Author Archives: Donncha

Misc Photography Stuff

Mark on PhotographyBLOG linked to several interesting articles recently..

  • White Balance – but he missed the most useful wb tip I know: Use the “Cloudy” setting when you’re outside. No matter if it’s sunny or cloudy this setting will make your photos appear richer in colour! Make sure you change the white balance when you go inside though. I always forget!
  • Photos of Holland – I like the “Just Married” one, especially considering the last photo!
  • Histogram Tips – I thought I had linked to this before, but the date says June 17, 2004 so who am I to argue? Lots here. Worth delving into.
  • Beyond Megapixels – 3 articles that I think were linked from /. were they?
  • Boring Photographs are the bane of every photographer, but we all go through stages where we just lack that extra something that helps us take great photos!

Via Blogsnob, I came across this photoblog – good photos and interesting techniques displayed! His Collaborative Site is an interesting idea. Hmm.
Further on the histogram topic, Garret linked to this article explaining and giving examples of histogram usage! Looks good, my LCD screen and even EVF aren’t very good at figuring out if an image is too dark or not.
Great photos on this blog, love this entry!

Turck MMCache Vs PHP Accelerator

After running MMCache for a day I have mixed feelings about it.
Our site felt faster when I browsed it but when I examined the logs the results were disappointing. Hourly adviews were almost all down by up to a 25% but mostly by 10%, but for an hour or two exceeded the previous day’s ones. By the end of the day, adviews were down by almost 10% in total.

I benchmarked both applications this morning using Siege.
MMCache performed marginally better in all tests, but only by a few percent.
MMCache caused a few problems for us, mainly because it reintroduced a limitation of PHP3. In PHP3 a class or function couldn’t be defined twice, but that’s changed in PHP4. I had to go around editing php files yesterday changing include/require to include_once/require_once which fixed 99.99% of the problems.
I may try it again next week but for now, it’s back to PHP Accelerator.

Out of curiosity I attempted the same benchmark without using any cache/optimizer. I stopped it halfway through when the load average of the box hit 40. Oops.

Related links: The Joy of Turck MMCache | TikiBoosting | which php compiler cache is stable? | PHP caching and optimization

mmCache Vs PHP Accelerator

Several days ago I started tuning and working on the cache and accelerator on my web server at work. Matt suggested I look at the mmCache for PHP, and I have it installed now. It’s early days yet, and adviews are down by a small amount but I’ll have a better idea of general performance tomorrow. It may pay to delete the mmCache cached files every hour like I did with PHP Accelerator too.
More later!

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