I’ve been a fan of How It Should Have Ended for years, and I also enjoy tours to see other creative people’s working space, so this video was a lot of fun for me to watch even without the cool rollerboards considered!
FOCUS!!!!!
Digging deeper into server issues…
I think I’m making progress, albeit in a number of avenues that I wasn’t necessarily expecting!
One thing standing out that is seeming to be more of a problem than I would’ve thought is that simply put – I’ve got a lot of WordPress installs on this server!!! Sorting through them all, I came up with something like 20 installs in total, which is amusing because I’ve only got like 10 domains currently registered … apparently I’ve built up a healthy list of test installs in addition to some really old ones that I never post to and thus don’t really think about.
Now I wouldn’t have thought this to be much of an issue until I was able to start digging into specific processes running slow along with their associated URLs and database queries, and it turns out that WordPress’s own cron function has been at least part of the source of my problems, for a couple of different reasons:
A) Across those 20 installs, a number of them weren’t up to date – some of them being so old that I had to update them manually (gasp!), and more prominently some outdated plugins that either also needed to be brought current or in some cases removed altogether for instances where I’m not even using them anymore (i.e. I used to heavily use a backup to Dropbox plugin, but I’ve since come to rely more on system-wide backups and I don’t even have Dropbox installed on my laptop today).
B) Also, I still need to learn more about how WP-Cron actually functions, but I think there may have been some cases where many sites were trying to all run at the same time, which is just a general recipe for disaster! From what I’ve read so far, it sounds like WP-Cron actually triggers based on page views … which confuses me how my test sites were even triggering … but one option here might be to disable WP-Cron and instead tie them into real cron jobs at the OS level so that I can scatter them throughout each hour instead of triggering arbitrarily.
I’m not entirely sold on B just yet, but realizing that I have so many separate installs definitely reinforces my curiosity around WordPress multi-site, which I was playing around with earlier this summer and actually abandoned when I decided not to redesign some of my sites. But from a resource management perspective it still might make sense, even if I just try to pull some of the like-minded sites into one install, or possibly even a bunch of the test sites, just to help get the numbers down!
All in all it’s a work in progress, but so far my last high load notification was at 5:50 pm last night and I updated a bunch of my installs in the hours since, so hopefully I’m starting to work through the issues and load is at least going down a bit! Mind you, it doesn’t help that I don’t really know what’s a reasonable daily page view volume that my current server should be able to handle … and granted, now that I’ve started playing around with routing some of my traffic through Cloudflare, I’m sadly reminded about how much junk traffic a server gets that never even becomes legitimate pages served (like brute force attacks, scanning, etc…).
One other tool that I’ve found that’s been helpful specifically in pinpointing the cron issues has been New Relic, which is actually a probe that I had to install under PHP on the server itself but then in turn monitors all sorts of neat stats about processing times and whatnot. I’m just using the free Lite version they offer now and it’s already been enlightening – definitely worth checking out!
From the latest Plex newsletter…
I thought this was pretty cool the way this was handled!
I wish I could do the same to get my hands on the @justlaugh handle – it’s currently owned by either a teenage girl from Chile or a spammer posing as one. Either way, they haven’t posted in 3 years. I tried reaching out via the Facebook profile that’s liked to Twitter, but never got a response. Oh well.
A Look at Web Page Performance…
I’ve been experimenting around with performance tuning on my web server the last couple of days to try and work out some bizarre, high usage issues when (unfortunately) in reality none of my sites really garner that much traffic to warrant the spikes that I’ve been seeing.
Some of it is common sense stuff like troubleshooting slow-performing WordPress plugins – for example, apparently W3 Total Cache was dragging down my response times even though it wasn’t active at the time, which lead me to reinstalling and then actually setting it up correctly because I think I disabled it a few months ago out of sheer frustration.
I also made some tweaks to my Apache/PHP build, thus resulting in my having to rebuild no less than a dozen times last night each time I’d find a new option that I could only enable by rebuilding! So if for some reason you found one of my sites down last night, that would be the reason why… 😛
In the midst of all of this, I’ve also been trying a number of different web page speed tests to try and gauge my progress through the whole mess – Google PageSpeed Insights is usually my go-to for general tuning, but I also like WebPageTest.org because it gives me waterfall graphs of every single element that needs to be loaded, and I also recently discovered GTmetrix, which is cool because it will run several tests at once and gives you the option to see results for multiple sites side-by-side … something I normally have to do in separate windows.
Anywho, one of the views that I found interesting from WebPageTest.org is where they breakdown the actual requests and bytes coming from each individual domain because obviously the lower # for either of those stats, the faster your page will load. Below is what Just Laugh’s homepage looks like…
What’s interesting here is that really only a select few of these domains are related to actual content – primarily justlaugh.com and then wp.com because our images use WordPress.com’s CDN via the Jetpack plugin.
All of the Facebook hits are for the single Like box in the footer, and the same with Twitter.
We also have a single ad widget for Amazon, along with a couple of Google Adsense units, and then we use both Google Analytics and WordPress Jetpack for analytics.
So really, totals breakdown something like this…
- Content – 75 requests for 509k
- Social Media – 51 requests for 667k
- Advertising – 51 requests for 634k
- Analytics – 10 requests for 18k
- GRAND TOTAL – 187 requests for 1,828k
Now don’t get me wrong – there’s certainly value that comes from each of those other three sources otherwise I wouldn’t use them in the first place, but it still says something interesting about web content in our times when social media & advertising tie-ins together make up more than double the actual real content that a website has to offer to drive those other things in the first place! And before you say that it’s really kind of my fault that the breakdown is like this because I designed the site, I would add that really, Just Laugh is extraordinarily conservative with regards to advertising compared to other media sites that still use pop-ups and wraparounds and those god-awful Taboola ads that currently infect 80% of the web today.
Of course, the real exercise here is simply how to improve on these numbers, which is tough because most of these requests are still measured in milliseconds and many are done in parallel. The whole page currently takes right around 10 seconds to render, which in some ways seems terrible but in comparison with sites like CNN and The Onion it’s actually about right in the middle.
Could I shave off a couple of seconds by eliminating the Facebook and Twitter widgets, or possibly even the Amazon widget???
Possibly, but would the savings really be worthwhile in the bigger picture when gaining Facebook and Twitter followers is also a worthwhile goal???
Clearly I have no idea, but it’s always fun to have real, actual data to wade through to consider things like that!
On the other hand, at least I can say for a fact that my caching is now working correctly because for repeat views, all of those 3rd party requests are pretty much the only things still getting reloaded… 😀
Smart Explanations of Complicated Matters
A big reason why I’ve always been a fan of Hank and John Green isn’t merely for the entertainment factor, but even more so because they’re both great at giving thoughtful explanations of the things that they talk about – particularly when it comes to complicated subject matters that are often prone to misinformation and viral rage.
Hank’s latest video about Benghazi brought this back to the forefront for me because I’ll admit that I didn’t really know that much about Benghazi, either! I knew that there was some sort of riot in Libya and extremists stormed the U.S. embassy there … presumably kind of like what happened with the Iran hostage crisis back in 1979…
…and admittedly I didn’t really even know much about that until I watched the movie Argo and was curious enough to research a little online afterwards to see how much of it was true! Spoiler: There were some significant inaccuracies…
Anyways, especially with complex and passionate issues such as what happened on Sept. 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, it’s important to look at the facts of both sides – because politics stripped aside, both sides do have facts – and I think in this video in particular, Hank does a really good job of doing that.
I also think with regards to Benghazi, it’s a frank reminder for folks in the USA in particular to keep in mind that Benghazi, Libya is actually a city about 600,000 people that’s lost thousands of people amid the country’s ongoing civil war and not only the much more brief span of time when four Americans overseas lost their lives in a terrorist attack on 9/11/12…
If you enjoyed this video, here are a few others informative ones from Hank & John that I thought were really well done if you’re interested in a rational dissemination of facts and whatnot…
movie thoughts … Vacation
Can Hollywood go just one summer without trying to remake and therefore ruin another timeless classic?! 😯
Honestly, although I wasn’t really sure how this one was going to go, I was actually both hopefully as well as a little curious because over the last year or so I’ve grown a bit more fond of the entire series of National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, with the original 1983 Vacation becoming one of my latest go-to movies to put on when I don’t really feel like watching anything in particular, but still want something to listen to in the background.
Thankfully, for the most part Ed Helms was able to take up the, err, helm of the bumbling, but good-intentioned family man pretty well and I actually ended up really enjoying it! It certainly helped that the movie acknowledged what most of us were thinking fairly early on in the film…
Rusty’s Wife – “So you just want to redo your vacation from 30 years ago? Don’t you think that’s going to be kind of a let down???”
Rusty – “We’re not redoing anything – this will be completely different. For one thing, the original vacation had a boy and a girl, this one has two boys, and I’m sure that there will be lots of other differences!”
Rusty’s Son – “I’ve never even heard of the original vacation.”
Rusty – “Doesn’t matter…”
It was one of those remakes where there were enough similarities to bring back good memories of the classic moments from the first movie, but not so much that it just felt like a desperate, shot-for-shot remake. And granted, some of the ideas worked better than others – I liked the relationship between him and his wife and their struggles, but the younger kid bullying his older brother felt a little uncomfortable to me … to the point where I think I was entirely too happy when he finally stood up for himself and shifted the tides!
Of course, it was also neat to see Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo make a short cameo as the grandparents as another nod. I think it was almost a cheerable moment when Clark handed down the keys to the old Family Truckster to help Rusty complete the final leg of his pilgrimage to the forever-sacred Wally World. Even the inspirational chat with old pa leading up to that exchange was both kinda funny and endearing at the same time…
Rusty – “We’ve had enough – this trip has been a nightmare.”
Clark – “Well, that’s what family vacations are, but you can’t give up, Russ…”
Rusty – “They always say that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey, right?”
Clark – “The journey sucks … that’s what makes you appreciate the destination. You had a dream to take your family to Wally World – never let that go. I know I didn’t.”
I just loved this scene because in only a few short lines of dialogue, they really managed to sum up who Clark Griswold, and now his son Rusty, too, is to a T … family men who dream big and will inevitably always come up short, yet perpetually continue looking forward even as everyone else has given up on their Christmas light displays and gone back into the house or despite the realization that the entire family has just taken a bath in liquid sewage.
It’s kind of too bad to hear that apparently this didn’t really do too great at the box office or among most reviewers, but I enjoyed it and it’s one of the few recent remakes that I feel actually continues to build on its franchise instead of dragging on or even taking away from its original glory. Clark Griswold would be proud, even if nobody else was… 😉
Ahoy, mateys – do you want to join our pirate crew?!
A few photos from our visit to Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party the other night!
The evening was fun, but it seemed like there was more going on than at Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party which made it kind of hard to enjoy just because it felt like we were rushing and splitting up a lot to hit the things that we wanted to hit. I think if you just did characters and trick or treating it might’ve been better, but we also fit not really that many attractions into our evening (maybe 3???) and the sacrifice was decent viewing areas for both the fireworks and the parade.
I think that was hands down the biggest challenge to me – you have to go deeper into the park for everything else, yet you really want to be on Main Street for the parade and fireworks, and when you’ve only got 5 hours to work with, it’s simply too much running back and forth if you’ve also got a couple of strollers in tow.
Although I’d probably be willing to give it another try, I’m not sure what I’d change at this point … 5 hours is really rough with how big the Magic Kingdom is. But at least we all had fun! 😉
Dream Journal : Trapped in the Past
If you found yourself non-consensually sent back in time, how would you get back to the present???
It started off as just another back in my hometown-style nightmare, but something wasn’t quite right about it this time. The more I wandered about trying to get back to Florida, the more I remembered about this alternate life of mine until I realized that I hadn’t just failed and wound up back home … instead, something very different was taking place…
The timeframe itself was a bit sketchy – Mom and Dad were still together, but clearly on the brink of divorce, and I was fighting with my sister a lot, but I also had these feelings like I just didn’t fit in and this wasn’t my time, and eventually I started to remember more about significant things in my life such as buying a house and having a wife and a decent job, and that’s when I began to fight harder to get them back.
Packing to leave was much different than before – after a fight with my Dad, I simply told him to join me for dinner the next day if he liked because the day after I would be moving back to Florida. I think the only things that ended up in my car were a laptop, some clothes, and an acoustic guitar because now I had the foresight that the other things that packed my car previously weren’t really needed anyways.
I was to head to Tampa Saturday morning by way of New York to try and hunt down my future wife. I didn’t really know what to expect – would she be back in New York as well or still in Tampa where I had left her? Worse yet, if I did find her in a state where we hadn’t even met yet, how would I convince her that I was her future husband and not just some crazy stalker person with insane amounts of information about her???
I walked through meeting her in my head the entire trip, picking nuggets of information about her and her family that no one else knew, as well as insight into our relationship together in the future, and how one day we would elope a year before our actual wedding, and how we would struggle for years before being able to have our first child. I still couldn’t imagine what her reaction would be to a stranger sitting across the table from her, able to recite her social security number and every medical procedure she’s ever had and her closeness with her grandmother … I was terrified but also determined.
The future that I once knew seemed so familiar, yet so far away … how does one get back to something you once took for granted?
Dream Journal : Shark Attack
I had gone swimming in this small swim area near the bay when somebody approached jokingly holding a baby shark.
The thing couldn’t have been more than a foot or so long, and this guy started wading into the swimming area even though everyone kept protesting that there were no sharks allowed in the swimming area!
It wasn’t long before the shark wrestled free from his grasp and got back into the water. In total, about a dozen people were injured – myself included – and an ambulance took us all over to Tampa General to get cleaned up. I was one of the worst that had gotten bitten because I was bleeding pretty bad after the thing took a chunk out of my right arm. They had me hold gauze against it and eventually came back around to give me stitches when they found that it was still bleeding.
I remembered right after I had gotten bitten dunking under water and reaching for the chunk of my own flesh that was falling to the floor, but I think I got jerked back up above water by somebody else just before I could get my fingers around it.
#halloweenhorror #floridastyle
Anniversary #8 … Memories
Yesterday was my eighth wedding anniversary.
At one point during the day, Facebook prompted me with the question of “What is my favorite marriage memory?” to go along with sharing a gallery of photos of Sara and I together, and I didn’t end up posting anything because at the time I honestly just couldn’t narrow it down to simply one.
That said, we talked about it a bit when we went out to dinner together later on that night and both of us shared some of our favorites because after eight years of marriage, who can seriously pick just one lone memory to elect as their all-time favorite?!
So here are some of mine, and although no doubt there have been plenty of other noteworthy occasions along the way, here’s what I came up with at this particular juncture in our grand adventure through time and space together… 😉
October 2006 – We celebrated our six-month dating anniversary together with a long weekend over at Disney where we stayed at Animal Kingdom Lodge for the very first time. We almost didn’t have any reason to leave the room because seeing the animals right outside our window was so cool.
In this picture you can see us enjoying a nice breakfast out on our balcony, which was amusing in its own right because Sara didn’t realize that room service automatically added a sizable gratuity when she added one herself, quite possibly making it one of the most well-tipped room service meals of all time!
October 2007 – We eloped! Exactly one year prior to the date that we’d chosen for our actual wedding ceremony, Sara and I snuck over to St. Augustine in the middle of the week for a mini-vacation that started with us very unceremoniously getting hitched at the courthouse … mostly for insurance purposes before she was to start nursing school that fall. We spent the next two days exploring the area and even climbed to the top of the local lighthouse, which now has a very special message from us in their guestbook if they happen to still have the one containing 2007 around!
October 2007 – Right around the same time, we moved into our first joint rental together – a three bedroom house where we would live for the next 3.5 years through nursing school, our real wedding, and the publishing of my first book.
Here you can see my beloved bride sizing up her new garden tub!
June 2009 – This year we traveled up to Minnesota to attend Tim and Amy’s wedding, but of course, a trip to Minneapolis just wouldn’t be complete without also paying a visit to The Mall of America! We literally spent an entire day wandering around something like five floors of this place, and playing mini-golf, and nearly losing my lunch on the rollercoasters that Sara forced me to go on. It was fun … most of it!
August 2010 – A year that will live down in vacation infamy, featuring Scott & Sara’s 2010 Awesome Summer Road Trip that put us traveling across the country for nearly a month, visiting all sorts of sights and enjoying a well-deserved rest before beginning to start trying for children in the upcoming future.
This particular photo is from our visit to Niagara Falls, which we actually ended up extending a day after not seeing nearly as much as we would’ve liked and admittedly having a pretty kick-ass hotel room to further enjoy the falls from to boot!
October 2010 – The anniversary where my wife actually somehow managed to surprise me with a trip to Disneyland!!! Truth be told, I even found it in her browser history at one point and she was a good enough to bluff her way out of it – that’s how good my wife is. We were there for a full week and visited both theme parks multiple times, on top of getting to watch the brand new World of Color from this great view that was quite possibly the highlight of the entire trip…
September 2012 – Our latest cruise was some three years ago, the same itinerary that we went on through the Western Caribbean for our honeymoon/2nd anniversary, though without all of the excursions and nothing but day after day of laying around the ship from port to port. I was so relaxed, in fact, that here on our very first day at sea Sara had actually persuaded me to get up and watch the sunrise with her … a feat that only five years of marriage, along with a pitifully small quantity of tequila, could dare to pull off!
August 2013 – And lastly, although he’s certainly produced plenty of adorable shots in the 18 months since his birth, I think this particular photo showing Christopher at nearly his earliest of all will always be my all-time favorite. It was roughly 10 days later when the doctor’s office confirmed from her hormone levels that Sara was officially pregnant … we were over at Disney to celebrate my birthday, and boy, was it one of the strangest, both exciting and nerve-racking weekends I think I’ve ever spent. Certainly a memory for the books, to say the very least!