Virtual server performance
When I posted the goggle mod, my web server started crawling. After I took a look, I found that the box had been swapping. (This wasn’t a big surprise) I’ve been running on a dedicated virtual machine at slicehost.net with only 256MB of ram. One way to improve things is to run nginx instead of apache to reduce the server’s footprint. After checking out my machine for a bit, I decided to simply upgrade to a 512MB slice. I’ll probably put nginx on as well, but I was getting low on disk space anyway.
Upgrading my slice can be best described as a piece of cake. The boys at slicehost have done a great job of building their slice management tools – and they don’t even charge you for the upgrade until you confirm that the upgrade worked to your satisfaction. And personally, I really don’t mind paying an extra $18/month for double the ram, disk and bandwidth.