Some of you, as you waited (im)patiently for some of these pages to load, may have been silently (or loudly) cursing me for abandoning the speed and simplicity of Blosxom for this bloated, sluggish monstrosity so overloaded with useless features that it takes eons to load a single page. In fairness to the Geeklog software and its creators, I have to confess that the previous pathetic performance here was a result of my own unwise implementation decision, which I have reversed.
I originally decided to host the MySQL database for this system on a machine in my office instead of on this web host. That allowed me some flexibility in maintenance, and also gave me a warm fuzzy feeling of security and control. Thirty years of tinkering with computers has left me unable to completely trust any machine I can’t touch, or don’t know who else is touching. I realized that the remote database access would probably cause a loss of speed, but I didn’t realize how bad it would be. Today I was doing some comparison, and when it took 30 seconds to generate a page on this host, and the same page generated in under 1 second on the 266 MHz G3 hosting the database, I decided I had to abandon my control fetish for the sake of performace. So I moved the database to this host, and now you won’t be able to take potty breaks while you’re waiting for the next page.