Blogs

I have over 100 git repositories on my Mac, and for almost every one, I sometimes browse the directory structure in the Finder. Once I do that, I inevitably end up with a few pesky .DS_Store files that want to be added to my repo:

.DS_Store files don't add anything of value to my code (they just tell Mac OS X about folder display and icons), so I always end up adding them to my own projects' .gitignore files. But when I'm working on other repositories (like Drupal, or a fork from GitHub) I don't want to add a .gitignore if none exists, or mess with the project's existing .gitignore. So what's a coder to do?

There are a couple good solutions:

Server Check.in (one of our services) is holding a contest this week: Contest - Win a RØDE smartLav!

All you have to do is post a comment, and you'll be entered to win!

Just posted a new blog post to the Server Check.in blog: Moving functionality to Node.js increased per-server capacity by 100x. Here's a snippet from the post:

One feature that we just finished deploying is a small Node.js application that runs in tandem with Drupal to allow for an incredibly large number of servers and websites to be checked in a fraction of the time that we were checking them using only PHP, cron, and Drupal's Queue API.

If you need to do some potentially slow tasks very often, and they're either network or IO-bound, consider moving those tasks away from Drupal/PHP to a Node.js app. Your server and your overloaded queue will thank you!

Read more.

tl;dr Node.js is awesome for running through a large number of network or IO-bound tasks that would otherwise become burdensome at scale using Drupal's Queue API.

Every year or two, I like to get a good overview of different hosting providers' VPS performance, and from time to time, I move certain websites and services to a new host based on my results.

In the past, I've stuck with Linode for many services (their end-to-end UX, and raw server performance is great!) that weren't intense on disk operations, and Hot Drupal for some sites that required high-performance IO (since Hot Drupal's VPSes use SSDs and are very fast). This year, though, after Digital Ocean jumped into the VPS hosting scene, I decided to give them a look.

Before going further, I thought I'd give a few quick benchmarks from each of the providers; these are all on middle-range plans (1 or 2GB RAM), and with the exception of Linode, the disks are all SSD, so should be super fast:

Disk Performance

(I used the command dd bs=1M count=512 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync for a simple benchmark, which writes and reads a 512MB file to disk. These results were averaged over three test runs).

Linode: 60.9 MB/s
Digital Ocean: 230 MB/s
Hot Drupal: 244 MB/s

GitHub is a great central repository silo for open source projects, and for private Git repositories for companies and organizations with enough cash to afford the features GitHub offers.

However, for many projects and developers, GitHub can be overkill. For my needs, I have many smaller private projects that I'd like to have hosted centrally, and backed up, but don't warrant BitBucket or GitHub accounts. Therefore, I've taken to creating bare repositories on one of my Linode servers, and pushing all my local branches and tags to these repos. That server is backed up nightly, so I know if I lose my local environment, as well as my Time Machine backup (a very unlikely occurrence, but still possible), I will have backed up and fully intact Git repos for all my projects.

I recommend you do something like the following (presuming you already have a Git repo on your local computer that you've been working with):

Step 1 - on your remote server (accessible via ssh)

Nowadays, most people assume that all modern computers and operating systems have network time synchronization set up properly and switched on by default. However, this is not the case with many Linux servers—especially if you didn't install Linux and configure it yourself (as would be the case with most cloud-based OS images like those used to generate new servers on Linode).

After setting up a new server on Linode or some other Linux VPS or dedicated server provider, you should always do the following to make sure the server's timezone and date and time synchronization are configured and working correctly: