Blogging Roller

Rendering a weblog page at rollerweblogger.org (an Intel-based Linux box) seems 4-5 times slower than rendering that same page on my homebox (an AMD Athlon 1600 box running Windows XP). I wonder why that is. I wonder if I can improve this situation by using database connection pooling. If that does not help, I'm going to have to do some kind of page caching. 10 seconds to load a page is just not acceptible.

The Server Side is reporting that Intalio will stop support for all of its OSS projects, except for Castor. I'm not sure what this means, but it does not give me any warm fuzzies about Castor. But, the fact that a new release of Castor v0.9.3.19 is now available for download is somewhat reassuring.

to the Roller project! Shawn contributed Blogger API support and a bunch of cool ideas for building up Roller in the "community server" area. Among other things, he suggested adding meta-data to each Roller website to help workgroups categorize and build directories of Roller websites, improving the very primitive newsfeed aggregation features, adding better access control, and supporting editor, guest, and administrator roles.

In case you are wondering, the artwork on this page comes from a bookcase that I painted for my 5 year old son Alex. I also painted an armoire for my mom using the same theme - the $1.69, doll-house variety armoire, that is.

CQHost took me down for a while because I had misconfigured my web.xml and Resin was trying to write log files to the wrong place. It took a while to get back up and running, but now I'm back.

During the downtime, I configured connection pooling for Roller by using the MM MySQL JDBC driver's MySQLConnectionPoolDataSource and by configuring Castor and Velocity to look up their datasources via JNDI. The performance improvement is wonderful - I've gone from 15-20 second page loads to 2-5 second loads on rollerweblogger.org and down to 1 second page load on my homebox.