Todd Huss

The market share change between Google and Yahoo has been breathtaking this past year! The article Google gains search share, widens lead on Yahoo (over at Yahoo news) indicates Google’s market share was 36.3% a year ago and now it’s up to 42.3% while Yahoo was 31.1% and is now down to 27.6%.

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This tongue in cheek post by Dion about Ruby not scaling made me chuckle but also got me thinking!

The whole question of whether a modern language scales or not is really the wrong question to ask. Almost any language will scale horizontally. Here’s one anecdote as an example: when we were going through the language selection process at GreatSchools several years back we rewrote some key pages in PHP, Java, and Perl (mod_perl) to try them out. Not surprisingly (more…)

Update 8/13/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.6
Update 5/10/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.2 and built Ruby with the ri docs per Duncan McGregor’s comment
Update 4/7/06: Upgraded to Rails 1.1.1
Update 3/28/06: Now that Rails 1.1 has arrived I’ve upgraded this package to include it.

Here are the Installation Instructions and here is the all-inclusive ~9MB file to download: RubyOnRailsMacIntel-1.1.6.tar.bz2. If you would prefer to build from source here is my updated version of Geoffrey’s do it all ru-ra-lim.sh script that now works on Mac Intel too.

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After upgrading Lighttpd to 1.4.11 from 1.4.8 it was no longer working with my Ruby on Rails project saying it couldn’t find public/dispatch.fcgi. Well, it turns out they made this security fix which breaks relative paths typically used in lighttpd.conf: (more…)

The Ruby on Rails scene for new users on the Mac has and continues to be pretty confusing! The version of Ruby that comes with the Mac isn’t suitable so you have to install a second copy and if you go to the getting started page at rubyonrails.org the first thing you see for OSX recommends building readline, ruby, fastcgi, lighty, and pcre from source. Fortunately (more…)

Keeping current with SEO has always been a challenge for me, it reminds me of paying bills, you have to do it but you don’t always want to. However, as the majority of our traffic comes from search, staying on top of it is important and as a result we’ve seen massive traffic growth (more…)

Eric Hodel posted their production website server setup over at the Robot Coop that handled 2.5M page views in a day not too long ago. I love this kind of information because it helps me get a feel for how we’re doing. At GreatSchools we serve around 900,000-980,000 page views on an average weekday, our record day was a bit above 3M page views, and siege load testing puts our cap around 4400 page views per minute.

The great thing about using siege is that we extract the load test from our access logs so that we can simulate real conditions. We size the hardware based on running at around 25% of our capacity on an average weekday which usually gives us just enough breathing room to handle a front page feature on Yahoo or AOL when those happen. (more…)

I wrote a tongue in cheek humor piece on April fools day last year about ditching Java and switching to .BAT. Earlier this year it hit the front page of Reddit which was very exciting since my little server stood up to the pounding pretty well. Then more recently it hit the front page of Digg (but only briefly). Talk about two totally different experiences! (more…)

After listening to this weeks Ruby on Rails podcast where Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed Bruce Tate, it got me to thinking about why Ruby on Rails appeals to me. For me as a Java person, the real appeal of Ruby lies in Rails and here’s why: (more…)

I started hacking around with subModal (modal javascript windows with background shading) this morning to add some features I liked in Lightbox Gone Wild. You can try it out and download my changes to subModal here. They are (more…)