linux

July 11, 2014

If you run your own website, it goes without saying that backing up your files and database is essential. Regularly doing a backup copy locally on the server might be adequate to avoid some kinds of disasters, but the best is to have an extra backup at a remote location. Amazon S3 is a perfect solution for this job. In this post, I will describe how to set up a Linux cron job to automatically back up your website and send a copy of the backup to S3 using the AWS command line interface (CLI).

October 4, 2011

Static Maintenance Page During Drupal Upgrade

Drupal has a setting that allows you to put the site off-line, and show a maintenance message to the visitors. However, in order to determine that the site is in off-line mode and load the maintenance page, Drupal still needs to boot up to some extent, which involves loading several PHP files and connecting to the database. This may lead to the visitors seeing error messages, if the site is being tampered with while they try to access the site.

July 18, 2011

A Simple Load Test with JMeter

In connection with the recent launch of a high-profile Drupal-based website, one of my responsibilities was to evaluate how well the then un-launched system would perform under the expected load. As a web developer, I don't often have the opportunity to do load testing, so I had to do some research on the topic beforehand. This post is a summary of the steps I took and my findings.