Monthly Archives: August 2012

Load Test Your Server with Blitz.io

Want to test how your server performs under load? If you’re in the process of optimizing a server, or have just installed a caching solution, it’s good to see the effect your changes have had.

Blitz is a configurable service that will pound your site with page requests, allowing you to specify the concurrency, timeout, and duration of the onslaught. As it goes about this, it builds statistics and plots them along timelines. You can watch response times, errors and timeouts as it slowly ramps up the number of concurrent users until it reaches the maximum. At the end, it even projects how many hits per day your setup can handle at that rate.

The service has a generous free tier, though they offer paid upgrades for higher concurrency and duration. The free tier offers 250 concurrent users over a one minute rush. (Though if you sign up with this invite link, they will add additional concurrencies to your account.)

I found Blitz very useful when I was trying to squeeze faster response times out of my WordPress setup, tweaking my caching system options and adjusting Nginx and PHP configurations. Since they use the connections at their datacenter, you get more real-world results than if you simply ran Apache Bench locally on the server, or from your residential internet connection. Both tools have their uses, of course, and Blitz is a good one to have in your arsenal.

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Twitter API Terms Revision Ignites Controversy

Twitter recently announced the next version of the REST API that powers the many apps that hook into the popular social media service, a move which sparked much criticism among users and developers alike. Some of the changes include: Every API endpoint will require…

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GitList: View Your Git Repositories on the Web

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could host your own private GitHub, for browsing your local repositories or remote ones you host on your own server? Well, there’s a new PHP application in town that lets you do exactly that. GitList, the self-described “elegant…

WordPress’s…Interesting Way of Dealing with Magic Quotes

If you’ve been working with PHP for awhile, you’re probably familiar with one of the worst ideas the language’s developers ever came up with: Magic Quotes. If not, here’s a brief history lesson. In order to help newbies write functioning MySQL queries, they thought…

Digg is Back, with a New Take and New Ownership

Remember Digg, the social news titan that tanked when a new update chased off its user base? It’s back, under new ownership, and with a different strategy. After a six-week sprint to reinvent the site, it has relaunched in its new form. There are…

BlogBuzz August 4, 2012