title: apologies link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/apologies/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 388 created: 2009/01/31 21:40:08 created_gmt: 2009/01/31 21:40:08 comment_status: open post_name: apologies status: publish post_type: post

apologies

There aren’t really that many people who visit this site. Really. But those who do, like me, rely on it for information that would be impractical to put anywhere else. Like the procedure needed to manually link an EBS (Oracle’s Enterprise Business Suite) user account with it’s corresponding OID (Oracle Internet Directory) entry in an integrated environment.

As a result, when the site is slow or actually goes down for a period of time, that outtage can be a major pain. For those who suffered through this yesterday (and previously), I apologize.

This site is hosted on a shared server run by a major hosting company. In general they do a terrific job of keeping the lights turned on. Their technical support has been very responsive over the years I’ve been with them. And the price is right. I moved this site from its original home on Blogger because there were some things I wanted to do that were not possible over there. In general the result has been worth the effort (the money has been negligible).

Most of the performance problems I’ve experienced here have been due to system “overheating”. It’s more complicated than too many systems sharing the same physical resources, but the fact is that a shared environment is always going to be more prone to performance issues than a dedicated one.

There are basically two ways to go here. Take the exact software I have here and move them to a dedicated host, or change things around so that resource issues on the shared host have less of an impact. The first option is really not an option right now. Given the traffic at this site I could never justify the expense of going to a dedicated server. As a result, the game plan will be to see what I can do with the second option. One of the things I’m going to look into is whether a database-driven blog is really the best software for the job I’m trying to do here. Those databases are a real Achilles heel for me. In some instances the static pages on this site are perfectly accessible, while my blog pages were not — because the databases where the data is stored were either off line or inaccessible because of resource contention.

There is a lot of content here that could be converted into static pages without any loss of usability. The one thing I’d need to implement to make that work would be a site-wide search tool of some kind so people could find the information they need. There’s a bunch of code out there to do that, most of it in perl, which is actually a good thing for me since that’s the language I’m most familiar with. The only issue might be with the availability of different modules not currently on my hosted system. As I discovered some time ago when trying to implement Apache::Gallery on my site, not all perl modules are shared-host friendly.

And so the adventure continues.

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