Sunday, July 29, 2007

Philosophy Of Speed
Two notes and then a mini-essay:

Note #1: Your PM inbox should load MUCH faster now. Please tell me this is the case (it loads much faster for me, but I need more eyeballs to test).

Note #2: There's a major problem with how we're tracking myOtaku hits. If someone visited your site like 3 years ago and visits again, that person isn't counted. I think that most people will, rather than a total count of unique visitors, be more interested in seeing a raw count of daily and total views (like a hit counter). That way if the same 10 people visit their site every day, their counter won't be stuck at 10 forever. What do you think? In addition to making more sense logically, changing how we track hits will also reduce our server load dramatically

Now the essay...

The biggest lesson I've learned about our network's speed is that it's not a matter of buying more hardware, it's a matter of doing more, better with the hardware that we have

With a few clever programming tweaks and database optimization routines, we can make parts of the network that took forever to load previously load instantaneously. No amount of hardware can make poor code or a poor database structure fast

This leads to an important life lesson: If you feel like you're missing something one day, don't look externally. First, see if you can make due with what you already have. You're probably neglecting those few tweaks you can make to remedy the present

Another example: I'll sometimes look in the refrigerator and think "Ugh, nothing to eat, time to go out and buy groceries" only to realize a moment later "wait a second! I can come up with an innovative recipe with the few completely random ingredients I do have." That's how my spaghetti with soy sauce recipe was born...
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