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Cracked the FTP Nut

The latest pre-release of Berylium2 transparently publishes static versions of all public objects to your webroot via FTP, and cleans up after itself as you move those objects around or delete them. It's called FTP Mirroring and it makes for fast page views.

An Example:
dynamic version vs. static version

Could you feel the difference?

If not, let me know-- I'll put the server under a load equal to 1 million page views per day and then you'll be able to tell. I've simulated that at home, it makes the render time of the dynamic version shoot up to 4 seconds or more. Yikes.

FTP mirroring gets hairy when you need to change a folder with a lot of objects and/or subfolders in it-- all of those static files have to be republished so that they have the correct contextual info in them, cookie-crumbs and so-forth. What a pain!

Fortunately, there are ways to limit the number of contained objects that need to be published-- first and foremost is age, especially age vs. popularity: older material that few people look at doesn't need a static cache. I'm willing to wait a second or two for something from 1999 to render.

The other really cool thing about transparent FTP mirroring from a sysadmin's point of view is that the static pages don't have to be saved locally. This allows Berylium to be used on a development server with the pages published to an offsite production server.

Or to put it another way, you can create webpages on your Linux desktop and publish them to a collocated server, without even having to think about it.

By Chris Snyder on June 5, 2003 at 11:29pm

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