PHP Performance

We've been working hard the last few days to squeeze every ounce of performance out of our PHP code. This article from Linux Journal was especially helpful:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7213

Also, if you haven't seen George's slides on PHP performance, check them out:

http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george/talks/ZendPerf.pdf

Life Insurance 101

Making sure my family is taken care of if I kick the bucket unexpectedly is important to me. Keeping my life insurance policy updated is one of the major steps I can take to make sure this happens. But I'm never sure which type of policy (term vs whole), the amount, or the length of a policy I should buy. I trust my life insurance agent, but I like to do a ton of research on my own. So I find consulting my financial advisor very helpful. His advice on life insurance can be found here, very useful stuff, highly recommended.

Book Review: The Ultimate Question

French fries or baked potato?

Khakis or Jeans?

Do I really need to do sit-ups today?

These are all questions I struggle with on a daily basis but none of them are “The Ultimate Question.” The Ultimate Question is a powerful, yet simplistic approach to achieving profitable growth. The book does a great job explaining why customer satisfaction and loyalty is so important and how it will ultimately lead to true growth. Definitely a book the entire organization should read.

Open Files

lsof -p process_id | wc -l

is just way too slow sometimes, I finally figured out a faster (and more accurate) way to quickly get a count (or list) of open files.

ls -l /proc/process_id/fd/ | wc -l

Thanks to http://www.netadmintools.com/art295.html