2012 Year in Review

I guess the biggest accomplishment of this past year is two-fold, I’ve officially switched to a dedicated server hosting with Amazon EC2 and secondly, I’ve made the switch from good ol’ faithful Apache to the new up and coming Nginx (pronounced Engine-X).

This change has provided a significant increase on my sites overall speed, plus I removed WordPress from the front-end and implemented a friend’s framework leveraging SlimPHP and static files.  I’m still being a bit lazy and have yet to move all of my sites to this framework…which causes my server to have up-and-down load times due to the heavy lifting WordPress invokes on the server.

Since moving to a dedicated server, increasing my main sites performance, performance in itself has been quite important to me.  I’ve written several articles on load testing mysql, wrote a speed comparison tool to use with any performance-related articles.

Finally, to wrap up the last quarter of 2012, I’ve spent some time learning Node.js.  I also had the privilege to be the technical reviewer of my former co-workers book: Building Node Applications with MongoDB and Backbone which will be available real soon.

On to 2013 – now that we have survived yet another dooms day day - one thing that I will be striving for this year is to hopefully compare AJAX to make sites highly dynamic and interactive against Node.js’ IO socket connection.

AJAX has been used successfully for many years and is easy to scale horizontally by adding new web servers.  However, I don’t know how it compares to Node.js’ IO socket connection.  It doesn’t seem like it will scale horizontally as easily because given that it is a socket, it’s stateful versus a webserver that we always attempt to make stateless…

I hope to have those results, unless someone else already has them?

Published on Dec 21, 2012

Tags: Theory