Entropic Memes is by no means a high-traffic site, even for a personal blog. However, it’s occasionally high-enough traffic that performance issues can occur, were steps not taken to prevent them. For this website, those efforts comprise four distinct efforts: Application-level output caching, server-side caching, scalable architecture, and a transparent caching proxy front-end. Each is designed to minimize the impact of one or more specific performance bottlenecks that have arisen over the years.

Today, having just hit the eight-hundredth post on this site, and survived the highest sustained level of traffic the site has ever weathered, I thought it’d be a good time to look - once again - at the last of these measures, the transparent Squid proxy that serves up all the requests for this website, and which has been in use for just over a year.
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Happy new year! It’s that time of month, when I usually look back at the previous month in a bit of highly meta statistic-mongering. Being the first of the year, some quick stats on last year here at Entropic Memes:
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It can only be the holiday season when the two most popular posts of the last week - out of the 645 and counting - on this website are about why I hate DHL and the lyrics to ‘A Conservative Christmas’.

The third most popular, somewhat less surprisingly, is about bittorrent encryption.

Entropic Memes runs on Wordpress (behind a Squid cache), with a lot of performance enhancements stuck on. One of the more overlooked benefits is that of the lowly and humble GZip compression provided through PHP - in my case, it’s enabled server-wide. It can reduce the actual amount of data transferred by a quite remarkable amount - saving not only bandwidth, but time, as well.

While looking at the server logs this afternoon, three subsequent requests for the same page caught my eye:
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No, it’s not my birthday - but it is three years since Entropic Memes was begun, and the beginning of the month; as such, instead of looking back at the past four weeks for this month’s roundup, I’ll just say that a lot has changed, both on- and off-line, in that time. Three years and about five-hundred ninety posts later, nobody is more surprised at the way this site has turned out than I. Thirty-six months is a long time on the internet, where sites come and go every second of the day, and the cool bellwethers become washed-up has-beens between the space of breakfast and lunch. Trends have come, and trends have gone, but - other than an increased effort at producing interesting content five or six days a week, and some (not insignificant) changes under the hood and behind the scenes - this site has weathered it’s life to date mostly unscathed. Hell, this site is still using the first and only theme it’s ever had; it’s been heavily customized, but it’s cosmetically unchanged.

To all the readers of this site, whether you’ve been following what I have to say for a few days, a few months, or a few years, I’d like to say thanks. Seriously, and sincerely, thank you. It’s the slowly but steadily increasing readership that, for lack of a better word, motivates me to do whatever the heck it is that I do here; at least half the fun in sharing the wacky ideas, strange discoveries, and other assorted stuff here is just that, the sharing. So, yeah, you folks rock. You never send money and you rarely write, but, dang it, you give purpose and meaning to my pseudonymous existence; what more could I ask for?