HTTP Blog

Three years ago I was very skeptic about blogs. I didn’t enjoy reading blog posts, I usually went to other sites if I spot a blog. After some time, I don’t even remember when, but I published my first blog and from the very first day I started to like blog sites. Particularly, Wordpress based blogs.

Nowadays, I suggest using Wordpress platform for new blogs to my friends and other guys I know. Very stable, easy to set-up platform and very important – actively developed with thousands of pretty cool plugins. It’s free – pretty cool, eh?

I manage quite a few popular blogs for my friends and if the server(s) are correctly tuned, have medium resources, then Wordpress platform can easily serve hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. As long as you use plugins that are coded with performance in mind you should have no problems.  Use Wordpress – it’s a nice publishing tool for your next blog.

One of the best solutions for streaming Flash video nowadays is Nginx. It’s super fast, lightweight and does easily support thousands of concurrent connections without taking up much resources.

By default flash streaming is not activated and you need to turn it on in compilation process. You enable flash streaming by:

./configure –with-http_flv_module …(add other options here)

and then add to nginx.conf the following settings:

location ~ \.flv$ {
flv;
}

Nginx can easily push hundreds of megabits per second so make sure your upstream can support it and you have deep pockets for bandwidth expenses

We got an email last night from a fellow reader asking what tcp_fin_timeout and tcp_keepalive_time we are usually using from small to medium blogs.

At this time, we keep the following settings:

net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 60
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 60