Did you know that you can give a hint to MySQL on which index to use? It’s called Index Hint and can be part of a query where you feel MySQL is doing a wrong choice (although that’s quite unlikely these days.) SELECT * FROM table1 USE INDEX (your_index) WHERE col1 = 1 AND col2 = 2 AND col3 = 3; Where your_index is the name of the index you’d like to use for this query. You can...
Pickle vs JSON — Which is Faster?
If you’re here for the short answer — JSON is 25 times faster in reading (loads) and 15 times faster in writing (dumps). I’ve been thinking about this since I wrote the ObjectProperty and JsonProperty classes for Google App Engine. They’re both easy to use and work as expected. I did have some trouble with ObjectProperty but I figured it out in the end. As my previous...
Driving the (ve) Server at Media Temple
It’s been a few weeks now since Media Temple launched their new (ve) Server and I’ve been testing it out for a few days now. I’m actually hosting my blog there to experience some real traffic load and my first impressions are awesome! I started off with the simplest 512 MB server and transferred a few websites to the new platform. I’m not too used to the Ubuntu Linux...
W3 Total Cache with Amazon S3 and CloudFront
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in...
Loading jQuery from a CDN in WordPress
This may seem like an easy task to do but is quite tricky in WordPress. Using a CDN these days is very popular, cheap and helps speed up your website taking the load off your web server. I personally love Amazon CloudFront! The tips at Google Code suggest you serve all your static content from different domains, preferably ones without cookies, so CDNs are perfect. All the problem with WordPress...
Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug
Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it? Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on...
Multiple Sites Driven By One WordPress Installation
This is early experimental. And, I’ve also marked this post into the “personal” category, because you wouldn’t want your clients to have too much access, especially if they share a single WordPress installation. Now I know there’s the WordPress MU project, but I guess I can’t use it in this case, because WordPress MU assumes your URLs will be within the same...