Simon Willison's Weblog: servers

What’s the best use in the office for my old Macbook Pro?

2013-12-03T10:39:00+00:00

My answer to What’s the best use in the office for my old Macbook Pro? on Quora

Set it up to display metrics or KPIs - by running http://www.geckoboard.com/ on it for example.

How can I learn more about server-side technologies?

2012-10-14T15:21:00+00:00

My answer to How can I learn more about server-side technologies? on Quora

Get yourself a VPS, set it up from scratch and run some non-critical websites on it (nothing with private user data since you can't be sure you'll set it up securely). Both Slicehost and Linode offer a good set of guides to a whole host of common tasks:

Running a server "live" on the internet is the best way to learn, provided you do so responsibly. Even better, start by running virtual machine servers on your own computer using VMWare or VirtualBox.

Getting Django set up is an excellent learning project :)

Tags: django, programming, servers, webservers, quora

How much ram do you need for 100M hits per day?

2011-12-20T18:36:00+00:00

My answer to How much ram do you need for 100M hits per day? on Quora

That entirely depends on what you are running your site on. If it's static HTML pages, nginx will work fine on hardly any RAM at all (though you would probably be better off serving the entire site out of S3 and not using a VPS at all).

For dynamic pages, the only right answer is to run a load test and see what happens. For that kind of traffic you'll probably need more than one server if you're serving dynamic pages though.

Tags: servers, web-development, quora

How can I determine which web server a particular website is using (Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc)?

2011-01-05T13:37:00+00:00

My answer to How can I determine which web server a particular website is using (Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc)? on Quora

If you're on Linux or OS X, use curl with the -I option (to make a HEAD request and see the HTTP headers):

$ curl -I www.op3intl.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:31:28 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

...

Tags: apache, iis, nginx, servers, web-development, webservers, quora

What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations?

2010-12-05T18:34:00+00:00

My answer to What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations? on Quora

Any OAuth library should scale horizontally - I can't see how any one library would be a better choice than another.

Tags: apis, oauth, openid, servers, web-development, quora

Google uncloaks once-secret server

2009-04-02T10:47:59+00:00

Google uncloaks once-secret server

Instead of a data centre wide UPS and redundant power supplies, each Google server has its own 12V battery. They live in standard shipping containers, each holding 1,160 servers.

Tags: datacentres, google, operations, power, servers, ups