beer planet

I've recently installed eAccelerator on the web server that hosts this site and I wanted to share some of my impressions after a few days.

• What does it do? Nobody put it better than the eAccelerator team itself: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times."
• Does it work? Hell yes. beerpla.net loads on average twice as fast as before. The results are consistent, so I'm very impressed.
• Ease of installation. Extremely easy. Compilation from source tarball, adding a few lines into php.ini, and apache restart is all it takes. Full instructions here.
• Feedback from companies who have installed eAccelerator is here. It's hosted by eAccelerator themselves but seems to be legit.

/End of short note

Nissan is showing their new concept vehicle at the Frankfurt Auto Show. The fact that the car looks like a bat mobile, as jalopnik.com correctly noticed doesn't entice me very much. However, the seat design immediately caught my attention. It's a… 3-seater? And the driver is in the middle? That's f$%#ing cool. Judge for yourself:

Pure awesomeness.

The DailyMail reports on some crazy ocean foaming in Sydney. What exactly are they talking about? Perhaps the pictures will explain better (or not).

At the recent Seattle Conference on Scalability organized by Google, Cuong Do, an engineering manager at YouTube, talks about YouTube's growth over the past 2 years and the scalability problems they have overcome. All in all, it's a very interesting presentation that I can recommend to anyone remotely interested in large-scale projects, such as YouTube.

One interesting fact that Cuong mentions is that the pre-Google YouTube tech team consisted of only 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects, 2 developers, 2 networks engineers, and 1 DBA. It's quite impressive that such a small team managed to maintain and scale such a widely popular service.

Here's the presentation (52min long):