Delivery is far too often a second thought, that is of course until the site is swamped or crashes. Once organizations are caught in a fire they look for firemen - that’s where I come in. A few talks, articles, and promoting good delivery practices in the community puts me in the fun [...]

In annals of useless of advice, this answer from the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) FAQ on PHP Advisory, to the question of what end-users can do to protect themselves, must rank pretty high:
The easiest way to protect yourself as a user is to only follow links from the main website you wish to view. If [...]

Infrastructure both online and offline becomes outdated or outmoded, and the core protocol of Web transmission - HTTP - is no exception. For years, Web developers have been both successful and stymied by this simple, stateless protocol. For example, consider the issue of authentication under HTTP. Basic Authentication should be familiar to [...]

If your application runs the same queries on a routine basis, caching those queries will be extremely beneficial to your overall performance. By enabling the query cache, you can take a query that takes 7 seconds to run the first time and cut it down to less than 1/2 for each additional request. If you’re [...]

Many web applications bottleneck at the database level. There can be many reasons for this and you want to make sure you’ve looked at a few items before you spend thousands on a bigger, better machine.
If you’ve peeked at the sample MySQL config files, you probably have noticed that they don’t start with very high [...]

Moving databases from one server to another running MS SQL Server can result in orphaned database users. This is because the database user isn’t properly mapped to the SQL server login on the new server. Surprisingly, the only way to fix this is by running a stored procedure called sp_change_users_login. Hopefully you’re aware of [...]

If you haven’t ever taken a look at the HTTP response headers your web server is sending out, you might be a little surprised at what you find. By default both Apache and IIS give out more information than most people would think.

If you have ever tried searching on this topic you’ll quickly find a lot of complicated sets of instructions on how to get this setup. The problem with setting up two versions of php is how php finds the location of the php.ini. As of php 5.2.0, you can add a couple registry keys that [...]

Database performance tuning tends to be overlooked until that critical moment when a large group of simultaneous users hit your site and it grinds to a crawl. At that point, people start looking for the magic “fast” setting that with a simple adjustment will fix the timeouts and deathly slow response times. Rarely is life [...]