Since I alluded to it in passing in an earlier entry , I might as well describe what I know about how THEMIS set up their systems to handle theload. (Disclaimer: this is second and third hand.)

To cope with the visitors to their regular web site, THEMISput their ordinary web servers behind eight Squid proxies , which were in turn behind a load balancerbox. This apparently held up very well to the quite a few millions ofextra visitors from Google Mars .The main movie page was on

Today's random optimization thought, brought to my mind by the processof trying to make DWiki run slightly faster:

If you can't make it faster, maybe you can call it less.

Caches are the degenerate brute force case of this, but programrestructuring is better. Repeatedly calling the same core routine canbe a sign that the upstream interfaces aren't really doing what higherlevels want, so the higher levels have to do redundant work.

Besides, if you can figure out a way to call

The basic volume numbers are that this week, we:

• got 13,909 messages from 248 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,580 sessions from 927 different IP addresses.
• received 195,437 connections from at least 36,864 different IP addresses.
• hit a highwater of 16 connections being checked at once.

These are mostly down from last week ,although not as much as I would like to see. Again, the per

One of the marks of good software is that it understands how usersthink it works, and makes itself work that way. Two little bits ofhow Firefox works make a good illustration of this.

Start with Control-+, the keyboard shortcut for increasing thefont size. You may have hit this all the time, but let me askyou: do you type it with Shift? The top number row '+' is ashifted key; without shift, you have actually been typingControl-=. Firefox