Boosting web server performance

Last year (2006) we figured we had a unique idea — lets podcast the Superbowl Commercials for the expats who live in Hong Kong and other places that we cover through our main site GeoExpat.Com. We had no clue about what would happen next — 40 thousand+ visitors showed up on DevLib.Org and downloaded over 2TB worth of videos in a week. Well, that brought our server down to its knees and along with the hassles of making sure that the videos got uploaded, handling a database crash and dealing with the excess bandwidth, we were not sure if this should be repeated again — specially since the folks over at YouTube had become the destination of choice since last year.

But, common sense did not prevail and we said “what the heck, lets do it again and lets do it with some better technology”.

In this post, we list some of the technologies used and how we optimized our server to handle over 80K visitors and 4TB of downloads in two days.

$100 Laptop Not So Much Useful As Useless

The $100 laptop project created by Nicholas Negroponte, has recently come under fire for not being quite the breathtaking, important technology it’s supposed to be, as most of the countries the laptop is geared toward would rather have things like food, shelter, and not dying. Various critics of the project have suggested that the laptops, lacking an internet connection or anything really that worthwhile, are much less important than the need for a basic communications and education infrastructure in the developing countries first.