Today was the first day that our K-fx2 uber server cluster went into full production and let me tell you it kicked butt - we were able to outperform our old setup by over 600% in our initial run. That was without any tuning either - I think I can get that number up even more - as a matter of a fact I’m looking to double it.

At the front of this magical beast is lighttpd. Lighttpd is sort of like Apache but it excels at serving up static images and handing off page processing to other servers running fastCGI processes on a tcp port (such as PHP, Ruby, Python). The latest news is that lighttpd is getting a major overhaul in terms of its load balancing and failover (which is my primary reason for using it) in a new and improved proxy module - that is great news. I can’t wait for version 1.5.0 which was announced today. I am going to get some good mileage out of that one.

I also started reading my new book, “Ruby for Rails” which is a GREAT intro to both Rails and more importantly Ruby as it relates to Rails. Pick it up if you are wanting to know what all the hubub is about. Caution: it starts off a bit quick for non-programmers but anyone with OO and MVC experience will be able to jump right in.

Sam got me interested in learning how to bend and flare stainless steel tubing (aka brake line and fuel line). I’ll have to look around and see if I can pickup an inexpensive set of tools and find some line to practice on.

The officially endorsed music for today is Chevelle’s live album - great mix of old and new songs in a raw and un-edited flurry of tracks - just what a live album should be.