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watir.com/ is an open-source Ruby library for automating web browsers. You can use it to run automated tests on your web application or even to load test your application. I haven’t used it yet but I can see how it could be useful, running a number of concurrent browser threads on a VPS, performing a set of actions… Read more »

I’m currently looking at using XHProf to profile WordPress performance on our hosting. It’s the first time I’ve really looked at the call graph generated by XHProf. It’s a crazy data visualisation that lists all function calls, it’s probably only of any use if it’s projected on a large wall in high definition. Click on… Read more »

This code hides the admin menu items for all users that don’t have the ‘manage_sites’ capability. On multisite that would mean only Super Admins can look at those menu items. This script only removes the menu items (so users can still look at the page if they know the path) but it de-clutters the admin… Read more »

I had to debug some issues today with a couple of scheduled posts not being published on time and showing “Missed schedule” on  a multi-server setup. I thought it may be something to do with WP-cron so put together the below code to add a new cron event to email me PHP server variables every 2 minutes. It… Read more »

www.webperformance.com is a great alternative to using LoadImpact.com for load testing. With LoadImpact.com they take care of the software and servers distributed globally for generating the load. You just pay for the pleasure! Realistically if you are load testing you want to generate substantial load. There lowest package for load testing a site that may get… Read more »

scalingwp.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/apc-opcode-caching-of-multiple-sites/ Talking about opcode caching when used on a server hosting multiple websites and how disk space, RAM and CPU time can be saved by using a shared common codebase.

  Looking up at the top of my browser I seem to have quite a few tabs open. About a third of theme have been open for a few weeks, another third have only been open since yesterday and the other third only open since this morning. I’ve got some interesting content open (well I… Read more »

If you use Memcached as an object cache for your WordPress site and you have many sites sharing a Memcached instance you may encounter problems. All down to WordPress and the Memcached object cache plugin you use creating duplicate keys. The W3 Total Cache plugin has a problem with this and so does this Memcached… Read more »

I use graphite to keep an eye on various web server stats such as processor usage, failed web server requests etc. Although the dashboard you get with Graphite works pretty well I’ve been looking for an alternative dashboard for some time. A while back I found Graphene which looks like an improvement on the Graphite dashboard… Read more »

Over the past few days I’ve been doing some capacity planning for the WP Sites hosting setup and as part of this I had to revisit the Rackspace cloud throughput limits. When you try to squeeze out every ounce of performance from say a 1024MB cloud server it’s quite easy to forget (Rackspace don’t actually… Read more »