Getting Just A Bit More

Jan 9, 2024, 1:56 am

In my quest for performance... These are the top enhancements I've made recently:

1. New server: my host has KVM servers at a lower price than OpenVZ (what I had). In addition to saving money, I have increased memory, more storage, and a dedicated kernel (Open VZ shares kernels). More memory means better caching configurations, which equals faster sites.

2. Brotli with Cloudflare: I had used Brotli (better compression) on my site in the past. Once I moved to Cloudflare as a proxy, they only accepted gzip inbound (though they sent Brotli). Last year they added Brotli passthrough support. Now enabled here, it eliminates half of the compression steps before pages are delivered.

3. Redis usage increase: I changed default PHP sessions from files to Redis, reducing latency for some pages.

4. New weather data source: I moved to Open-Meteo. The data files are over 80% smaller, for faster loading of the weather forecast.

Researching these improvements, many ask "Why" if only to save a few milliseconds...
Small changes today are the building blocks for great achievement in the future.

News Enhancements

Aug 30, 2023, 12:10 am

The News System had a significant rewrite on the backend. It looks identical. The technical change was a shift from using PHP to craft an individualized page to having it send a news dump. By reducing the complexity of the PHP code, the page is created faster. Javascript replaces the PHP for drawing the News section. The weather section starts loading sooner. Total page load is about 0.2 seconds faster. May not seem like much: it's 30% faster.
 
This was the last cookie code on the site. Removing cookies reduces traffic to the server and eliminates a legacy technology. The database schema was flattened as there is no need for the linked tables; reducing load and increasing performance. Feed selection and searching is now processed locally. These features do not talk to the server, making the actions nearly instant. There's a cost for this, but it is minor.

The full news feed creates a larger initial page load. The total page load is 90 KB larger. On a 100 mb/s internet connection, that adds less than 0.01 seconds.

More Weather

Jan 30, 2023, 2:42 pm

I've created a dedicated weather page. The original weather widget that I built was constrained to fit in the space I allocated on my homepage. By having a dedicated page, I have more options for what to display and how to display it.

To start, I have split the graphs into a "tower" of graphs. One view to show temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, wind speed, humidity, pressure, visibility, UV index, and snow (if it's in the forecast) simultaneously. This uses the same data feed as the weather on the main page, which is cached. Performance should be very good.

Next up, what data do I have that is not being displayed? Are there opportunities to optimize the look and overall performance?