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The wooden spoon of overcomplexity

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Stuart Langridge

Posts: 2006
Nickname: aquarius
Registered: Sep, 2003

Stuart Langridge is a web, JavaScript, and Python hacker, and sometimes all three at once.

The wooden spoon of overcomplexity

Posted: Mar 1, 2005 4:07 AM

This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Stuart Langridge.
Original Post: The wooden spoon of overcomplexity Feed Title: as days pass by Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall	Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Stuart Langridge Latest Posts From as days pass by

So, we released the new LugRadio site and it ran really slowly. Now, it’s built on PyBlosxom, and it’s pretty complicated in parts; some pages include other pages by reading them off the filesystem, some include server-parsed versions of those pages; a CGI can’t output SSIs, so I had to do it myself with urllib; etc etc etc. It was dead slow. So I was trying to think of the best way to solve this; I thought about using PyBlosxom’s static rendering or running PyBlosxom under mod_python (no link provided as the HOWTO that’s out there is out of date and wrong; apparently there’s stuff in CVS which does it too, but I don’t want to run CVS and it relies on WSGI which I don’t understand either). And then Matt mailed me and said “can we use caching to speed the site up?” And I thought: why am I trying to do this a really complex way? Since the site doesn’t do anything interactive (it does build pages dynamically, but the resultant HTML for that page is the same every time), why don’t I just spider the lot and serve the resultant saved static HTML? So that’s what I did, with the command

wget --no-host-directories \
--directory-prefix=/var/www/lugradio.org/static \
-p -E --mirror http://secretlocation.lugradio.org/

so the previously existing pyblosxom version now exists at http://secretlocation.lugradio.org/ and www.lugradio.org points at the statically saved HTML in /var/www/lugradio.org/static. And, because it’s all plain HTML files, it works like blazes. The wget command is cronned to run hourly. That’s it.

I’m a bit worried that I’m overlooking simple and good solutions in order to be more complex. That’s not only not a good thing, it’s exactly what I complain at other people about; overcomplicating a solution is not a good thing, and the KISS principle dictates not doing it. I need a slapping for not doing it the simple way. I’ll be installing complicated “frameworks” and so on next. If that happens, shoot me.

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