Monthly Archives: September 2011

I’m Speaking at WordCamp Louisville

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I’ll be speaking at the 2011 WordCamp Louisville this Saturday, October 1st. This will be my third time speaking at WordCamp and second time for this talk – Configuring WordPress for Multiple Environments. I gave this talk as well as moderated two unconference sessions in June at WordCamp Chicago. It was a very rewarding experience and I look forward to speaking again.

Here’s the talk synopsis:

WordPress boasts a “5 minute install”. This is great for simple sites running only in a production environment. But if you’re using WordPress as a development platform or following a software development life cycle things become a little tricky. This talk will cover ways to migrate WordPress between different environments smoothly, including: code, database, and environment specific tasks. Although some aspects of the talk may be advanced, there will be demos, code samples, and time for Q&A. So if you use WordPress in more than just production, this talk’s for you.

In addition, VIA Studio (my day job) will be the title sponsor for WordCamp Louisville. So I’m also running a “Genius Bar” with my team. We’ll be available to answer any user or development questions you may have about WordPress. I know I go to a conference hungry for answers to very specific questions. Hopefully this WordPress “Genius Bar” provides that, and of course drums up some business.

Register for WordCamp Louisville. It’s only 15 bucks!

Installing siege on Mac OS X Lion

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I am not a system admin or *nix guru. So configure-ing, make-ing, and installing applications from the command line remains intimidating. I did what most people would do – went to Google and searched for “installing siege on mac os x”. Top result looked promising. I copied step 1 to the command line. Error. Not sure if it was because the article was for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and I am on Mac OS X Lion or if I was missing a dependency the author pre-installed. Either way, if step 1 fails, it’s time to move on.

To step back, siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. Lately I’ve taken a strong interest in benchmarking my web applications. Mainly because I am developing APIs and using WordPress (which is notorious for being slow under server load). Although ab (Apache Benchmark) comes bundled with apache (which is preinstalled on Mac OS X), I’ve been hearing a lot about siege at conferences. As any good developer should, I wanted to tinker with it myself.

Installing siege

  1. Open the Terminal app
  2. Download the latest version of siege (currently 2.70) 
    curl -C - -O http://www.joedog.org/pub/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz
  3. Extract the tarball 
    tar -xvf siege-latest.tar.gz
  4. Change directories to the extracted directory (again, currently siege-2.70) 
    cd siege-2.70/
  5. Run the following commands (one at a time) to build and install siege. If you have an older version of siege read the INSTALL file for more instructions. 
    ./configure
make
make install

This installed siege to /usr/local/bin/. This should already be in your PATH, so type:

siege

You will be presented with a message that instructs you to generate a siege configuration file for your account.

siege.config

Now you can run siege. The following sends a 10 requests across 10 concurrent connections for benchmarking (no delay between requests).

siege -c 10 -r 10 -b http://jason.pureconcepts.net/

If you want to learn more about configuring or using siege type siege -h or visit the siege manual.