Cocoa Geek

Ever since i started this blog i have been using Apache2 as the webserver and i have been quite happy with it, however recently i have noticed that it uses an insane amount of RAM. I have 240Meg of ram on this VPS and almost all of it was eaten by Apache after a few days uptime - even hacking the .conf files didn’t do too much to rectify this. So i decided to look elsewhere, having used lighttpd on my development machine since April i decided that i could probably roll it out on here. This was really easy to accomplish and wordpress was nice and simple to setup afterwards in order to maintain my permalink structure - there are plenty of blog posts out there on exactly how to do this so i won’t add to that comment on here.

Generally i think as a web-server it is easier to set-up and configure than apache - setting up an RRD perl script to log my RAM and CPU usage was a dodle as was all the fastCGI stuff. I’ve not yet tried to do anything too fancy like serving a ROR app or a JAVA app or anything like that, although now i have the RAM to spare i might have to give it a go…

I have (over the last couple of days) shifted the server on which cocoageek.com is hosted, this has meant reconfiguring the whole database and http server as well as the blog etc. This is still in process, which means some things might not be working perfectly just yet. The process was quite easy but not perfect - so if you notice any problems can you please send me a direct message on my twitter.

Yesterday I migrated this blog from Wordpress 2.5 to Wordpress 2.6, a nice and easy process as the website assured me. Inevitably for me something went wrong when i was updating the database which corrupted the database - don’t get me wrong i think this was a problem with corrupted data when i transferred the latest Wordpress over FTP as opposed to a Wordpress bug itself. Fortunately i had kept constant backups of my database using a combination of Bazaar and a simple bash script. This meant i could quickly re-import my database and be back online i was within a few minutes. The moral of this story is its worth backing up! If you wanted you could even have cron do it for you (if your server allows).

On another note since i was messing around upgrading and everything else i thought it would be a good idea to finally get a contact form up and running. So if anyone needs to contact me feel free to do so here.

Just a quick update on the circular recording technique i described yesterday, i have uploaded the compleated recording to Cocoa Geek Music for anyone who is interested.