A friend's site that runs Drupal 4.6 is becoming more popular by the month. With increased popularity, comes increased traffic, and the need for more resources.

Problem: Slow Site

After moving to a dedicated server, things were better for a while, then in late March to early April, users were reporting page load times that are too slow. I mean really slow, as in 25 seconds per page per request.

Hardware is not the issue here. This is a Debian Linux server with a dual Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2GB or RAM.

Investigation: CPU Bound

After logging in and doing some investigation, I saw the following output from vmstat:

A while back, I wrote about RateMyProfessor.com, and yearned for other areas that can use the model.  I specifically mentioned RateMyManager.com and RateMyCompany.com.Well, someone did something about it, and put up JobVent.com, where people can "vent" about the place they work at.As it stands today, companies like Hewitt Associates, Wal-mart, and North West Airlines are among the worst, and Fidelity Investments, Walgreens,  and Northrop Grumman are among the best.

It seems that MySQL has countered Oracle's purchase of Innobase's InnoDB and Sleepy Cat's BDB, by buying its own transactional engine from Solid Tech, and even making it GPL. The obligatory Slashdot discussion here.

The last time I tried to count Drupal sites using the empirical method of searching Google, there were 58,400 sites running Drupal. That  was in January 2006.Today, the same query says 75,800 sites!If this method is accurate, we have 29.79% growth in a mere one quarter.Phenomenal ... 

If you search Google on certain words, you will find that the second result is my article on the Dubai Snowdome. This has caused confusion for some people. Today I got this email titled "Dubai Snowdome" from Monika from Virginia, USA, who uses AOL, saying:

Which winter-sports facilities are planned? Is there anything for luge, skeleton, bobsleigh? Thank you very much.

This is yet another case of mistaken identity.

Newsweek columnist Steven Levy writes about former Apple and Microsoft executive Linda Stone, who coined a new term: Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) where attention to almsot anything is almost always partial, whether they be Blackberries, cell phones, instant messages, email, ... etc.There is a Slashdot discussion on this article.I have written a while back on this "syndrome" in previous articles, namely: Interruption Interruptions, and Life Interrupted.

2bits.com my Drupal development and customization consultancy has launched a new unique looking theme for its site. This was long in the making, but we are very happy with the end result as it looks fresh and unique. Thanks to the excellent design and artistic skills of Ivan Raszl of Creativine.com. Ivan also designed the baheyeldin.com theme.Apart from the new theme, this is a plain corporate brochure type of site, running on 4.6, with a few demos of modules I've written (all available on Drupal.org, such as stockapi, currency, feedback and sitemenu).

Here is another case of mistaken identity. One page I wrote about Alexandria, Egypt satellite images and maps is highly ranked in Google, and lots of people land on it when searching for "satellite images alexandria" (try it yourself).In this case, I am asked to supply a satellite image of Alexandria for a fee. 

Good evening,     I am [name withheld], I work in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the Alexandria and Mediterranean Research center department.

I got this email today (in Arabic).

برجاء الستفسار عن مواعيد تشغيل عرض القبة السماوية يوم الجمعة 17/03/2006 ويم السبت 18/03/2006 شكرا طيار / م 

What this is saying is

I would like to inquire on the hours of operation of  the Planetarium for Friday 17/03/2006 and Saturday 18/03/2006. Thanks. Pilot M [name withheld]

Many people in the past have confused my site for the Library of Alexandria, which also has  a planetarium.

Brian Krebs writes in the Washington Post about an online interview with someone who setup a botnet of 30,000 Windows PCs  by downloading malicious source code and making it into a worm.The main reason is unpatched Windows that lack security fixes. Slashdot has a discussion on this.