Module Upgrades…
Over the next few days, there might be some service interruption here at Planet Rant/Mentat: there are a couple of reasonably large-scale module upgrades that need to be implemented.
It also seemed as good a time as any to implement some mechanisms designed to shift resource load (in line with 'best practice' website optimisation strategies), namely:
- the RSS feeed will be redirected (so that those who have subscribed to the on-site RSS will be redirected to the FeedBurner feed);
- most images will be combined into 'sprites' (after being reduced to 8-bit with a web- optimised palette and 'smush'-ed);
- all static content (javascript, images and CSS) will be moved to a CDN (Amazon's S3).
The 'sprite-ifying' of images has already been done on the development server; this, along with the reduction in the file-size for optimised images, reduces page weight by quite a bit. Shifting content to a CDN will enable more parallel loading of page elements, and will reduce the 'first mile' transfer speed (because the out-pipe from S3 is a full-width T1).
It's all designed to reduce page load times and to have as near as possible to optimal page generation. The pages on this site are already within an ace of being rated 'A' on YSlow using the YSlow (V2) metrics (the actual score is 87 – an 'A' is 90 or more). Using the less-onerous YSlow criteria-set for 'small site or blog', we get an 'A' with a YSlow score of 96.
Over the Christmas/New Year period the development site will be replicated onto a CloudLayer dedicated host (a quad-core beast with 4Gb of RAM) and once that's bedded down the 'production' site (the one you're reading now) will likewise move over – mid-January is the targe date.
All of these things taken together are designed to get the 'back end' optimised, in preparation for the move to streaming-quote content and the introduction of RantTV.
