Speeding the Site Up?

By Red5 on January 22, 2010 7:27 PM | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Whilst this blog has remained quite for long periods of time, it doesn't mean that work and new developments on the site have stopped.  Far from it.  The server and the site are continually monitored, optimised and improved.  The main reason for the quietness is that, on the whole there's not a lot to show for this work on the site's interface.

Here's a case in point:

Last night at around 22:30 in the evening I implemented a little trick to help speed up access to the site. I configured the site to utilise caching in a more optimised and efficient way.  It seems to have worked, for me at least.

This is the graph of ethernet traffic that the site has served in the last 24 hours - notice the big drop at about 22:30?  The bandwidth used today seems to have been significantly less than yesterday.

The traffic for the last 7 days displays this drop-off in another way, with the most recent day towards the left of the below graph:

How about that then!  It looks like the bandwidth has more than halved today when compared with the last seven days, and compared to last Friday it is obvious that a big change has been brought about by caching.

Is this really something I am expecting you all to be excited about?  No, not really.  Well, not about the technical stuff at any rate, but you may be excited if this change actually made your use of this site faster and more efficient.

This is the sort of thing that goes on behind the scenes here at UsingEnglish.com on a constant basis, and all to try and make your experience of our site that bit better and more enjoyable.  Please, however, forgive me if I don't post many of these types of post and the Site Diary remains quite for periods of time.  I suspect that if I started posting this sort of content then many of you would become very bored quite quickly.

If you haven't already given up reading this post then I congratulate you on your patience!  I'd also like to ask you something:  have you noticed the site responding better today?  Have you seen any change at all?  If you have, I hope that you enjoy the new streamlined experience and feel able to let us know about it!

Thank you!  :-)

Categories:

• General

Tags:

• site speed upgrade cache