Knowing that your blog can end up on top page of Reddit and HN simultaneously without slowdown or swapping: priceless.
(Though I'm sort of glad that I decided to put the blog on its own VPS "just in case". As in "just in case it gets burned into ashes by a traffic spike, the people who actually pay me money will be completely unaware of my technical difficulties happening on the other server").
Previously a few of my other PHP sites had problems under load on the same box (GoogleBot, or something identifying itself as GoogleBot, went wild once with 100k requests in a day and the Apache child spawnage caused the machine to swap, starve, and die).
I bumped it up to 512 MB ($250 a year extra cheaper than irked users emailing me) and added the following to httpd.conf, on the advice of some Slicehost-related blog post or forum thread or something, can't remember.
No problems since. (I was watching on top through the night, and while the CPU was spiking up to 25 ~ 50% the memory usage never exceeded 400 MB, and it ended up not using so much as a kilobyte of swap.)
I would make MaxRequestsPerChild nonzero, something like 3000 to 10000. Even Yahoo, which employs the creator of PHP and several Apache committers, restarts their Apache children every 8 hours. Otherwise you are making yourself vulnerable to memory leaks or bugs that might take weeks to manifest.
I would also bump up MaxClients. If it's too low you will refuse connections under load and never know it -- there will be no records in your logs.
This article actually says nothing about OSS, it just talks about a competing bingo card generator. He has a competitor that uses Sourceforge for downloads. He thinks that's inconvenient, so he makes his stuff easier to download. OK, but the open source project could fix that problem in about thirty seconds.
Marketing is important to pay attention to, but again, it has nothing to do with open source or closed source. The competing bingo card generator software could easily kick up the marketing machine a bit, and put this guy out of business. But they probably don't really care to do that -- they wrote the software for themselves, and just felt like sharing it with others.
The real message that this article conveys is that the best way to avoid competition is to do something nobody cares about.
(Also, am I the only one that thinks the UI for his app is horrid? Why is the word list, the main point of interaction with the application, a tiny drop-down listbox?)
OK, but the open source project could fix that problem in about thirty seconds.
I think "Patches welcome." sums it up pretty well.
easily kick up the marketing machine a bit, and put this guy out of business
There are actually over a dozen competitors already and I still am going to make a living out of it but, hey, the more the merrier. If you convince them to kick up the marketing machine could you get them to try AdSense on their pages, too? It works well for me on the other free competitors.
The real message that this article conveys is that the best way to avoid competition is to do something nobody cares about.
2.6 million elementary school teachers in US, 2.1 million of them female, average salary $46k, strong continuing employment prospects, minimally BA with about 40% masters, spend $200 to $400 annually on instructional supplies out of personal funds.
I know Silicon Valley, programmers, et al thinks that is a whole lot of nobody. Believe me, that suits me fine -- please continue with doing really important things like making another social network monetized by CPA ads for 18-34 year old males. I'll be in the cafe working on getting the next 1,500 paying customers.
Why is the word list, the main point of interaction with the application, a tiny drop-down listbox?
Because the text area confused people -- they'd try to split up cells with spaces or commas (not possible since other users wanted spaces/commas in their cells and don't even think about asking these users to learn escape keys), they'd try to drag in photo albums and wonder why it didn't work, and on 50 ~ 250 word lists they had difficulty scrolling up and down to find whether they had already typed a particular entry or not. For example, if you were playing US states and capitals bingo, and you forgot whether you had added Montana yet, there was really no good way to check without all the words being visible at once.
That was a tricky requirement when some users want over a hundred words because they understand bingo math and wanted to prolong the game to last a class period.
Anyhow, alphabetized combo boxes turn out to be very easy to search to verify presence of a particular item and also completeness of a set of items, regardless of insertion order. (Alphabetized text areas, on the other hand, have a nasty feature of making something that someone just typed vanish inexplicably much of the time. Then the user thinks they did something wrong, and they get upset.)
Wordpress.org software: $0
Knowing that your blog can end up on top page of Reddit and HN simultaneously without slowdown or swapping: priceless.
(Though I'm sort of glad that I decided to put the blog on its own VPS "just in case". As in "just in case it gets burned into ashes by a traffic spike, the people who actually pay me money will be completely unaware of my technical difficulties happening on the other server").