News/20070422

Sunday April 22, 2007

Caching Enabled!

I won't make any bones about it—the wiki has gotten very busy lately. We are serving up well over a million pages every month to players looking for information (45,993 pages yesterday alone!), and as a result, the wiki is putting a pretty good beating on the server where it's installed.

To try to increase performance and reduce the load on the server's CPU, a few changes have been implemented. Ideally, these changes will be completely transparent to all of the wiki's visitors. Of course, whenever any type of major changes take place, though, things sometimes go awry. If you notice any weirdness or errors, please feel free to post a message in the Site Issues forum, or if you can't reach the forums, e-mail me at tonyv@pcfreepress.com and let me know.

To anyone who's curious, the exact changes I've made are:

• Installed my own (hopefully!) optimized copy of php 5.2.1
• Installed and configured FastCGI in php
• Built and installed eAccelerator, a compiled php caching system

Hopefully, these changes will not only make my hosting provider happier, but speed up access to the wiki as well.