Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

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

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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):

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Updated: June 6th, 2008

Update: The method described here is obsolete. Youtube and Google released a beautiful API located here: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/developers_guide_protocol.html. You can do everything mentioned in this article and a lot more using it. Here's a sample: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=rss&racy=include&vq=BBC+Five&start-index=201&max-results=50

So it looks like YouTube updated its RSS page recently and now has the ability to create RSS feeds by tags or user, like so:

Tags:
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the tag "monkey," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss

Users:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert_username_here]/videos.rss
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the user "YouTube," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss

The search by tag approach, however, won't necessarily get complete results because it will depend on user tagging the videos. …

Updated: July 17th, 2006

(Work in progress) Last week at the new company I got hired at, I was trying to push the repository approach to developing and maintaining data. For one reason or another, it wasn't being done at the time. As a CVS user and admin, I wanted to set up CVS but decided to explore other options as well, including Perforce and SVN. Well, the choice between those 2 was easy: SVN is completely free while Perforce allows only 2 licenses with $800/license beyond those 2. My first SVN impression was that it's quite different from CVS, but in a very good way. Now that I'm actively using it, I'll be adding my thoughts to this page in the …

Updated: July 15th, 2006

Edit: updated link.

Rendr is a live CSS and HTML rendering tool. It displays what the page would look like as you type, making it great for rapid testing of page designs. Just paste some HTML and CSS and the page will change on the fly. The edit box is also movable and resizable….