Scale and speed and spam

Obligatory Laugh-and-head-shake digression: I’ve been fighting email spam for 12 years plus, and I still see stupid spammers – pardon the tautology – indiscriminately junkmailing abuse@  role addresses. Idiots. Why not just offer crack to a cop?

With that thought out of the way…

Mike McGrath’s memcached plug prompted me to give it a go here, for well, two reasons.

a) I’ve had some (good) experiences in the workplace with it – it’s a boon for database intensive web apps especially and b) because I can and it’s there (which is always a good reason in my ever humble view)

Memcached itself is always a fairly simple install for Fedora – Install via yum (including memcached-selinux if you’re running SELinux – and if you aren’t why not! :-)), give it some options via /etc/sysconfig/memcached eg. CACHESIZE=”64″ (at home, usually “1024” at work because their app is a lot heavier) start it up and point clients at it.

WordPress was a touch trickier – there isn’t an “official” WordPress plugin, with a client available buried in WordPress Plugins version control (http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/memcached/trunk/) – which has worked well – if you’re reading this it’s not killed my blog.

To install, grab the above file(s) and drop the object-cache.php file in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content, set “WP_CACHE” to “true” in wp-config.php and you’re most of the way there.

On the server side, memcached-tool’s “stats” command should start seeing increases in cache hits/misses and cached object numbers.

Adding Andy Skelton’s batcache plugin can help to fine-tune what and how it caches – it’s functional but not as “click-and-drool” as many WP plugins, but how much tweaking do you need to do really?

Drupal was a similar adventure I’ll go into elsewhere; there’s a reasonably simple to install plugin from drupal.org – download, drop into /etc/drupal/all/modules, configure and enable –  and the results just as good.

I was surprised to find related Perl packages not in the main repository (Other major languages are covered – my workplace couldn’t survive without the Python bindings :-)) so I whipped up a package of Cache::Memcached 1.26 (also for RHEL/CentOS) on my own repository, plus I’ll be uploading it for review for Fedora proper[2] as a Perl-using systems admin it’s just too useful not to have (monitoring / stats-gathering scripts for a start :-))

In my continued masquerade as a web developer/SEO maven (which isn’t fooling anyone, I know!) I’ve spent too much time looking at analytics to the point of my poor old eyes turning square and developing line graphs burnt in to my retinas.

At least that’s been a little successful. I have one sticking point in the development side, which is avoiding / dumping web form spam. I could use CAPTCHA but I forsee a lot of visitors finding it off-putting, which is undesirable (it’s for my girlfriend’s business venture). I could use Akismet but that seems more suited to blogging, alas (and I’d need to package the PHP PEAR apps for it anyway).

I’m welcome to other suggestions as always.