webservers (nerd alert)

I've been tinkering with the webserver software that enables websites to exist for a long time. So I was delighted to learn that things have changed recently.

I first started working with the early servers back in 1995. I've written high-speed authentication modules, I've done every kind of configuration trick, and I've deployed various load balancers, lightweight servers and cache servers to keep them producing the goods under heavy loads, and I've done various tricks with enterprise management utilities to keep them running. But it's only now that I've started to get into some of the current generation of software that's out there and I'm damn impressed.

Using an nginx server to produce the "static" stuff like images while using a separate application server to provide the more complex content that's generated by code struck me as a novel and interesting solution. It's harder to keep running, and involves more hoops to jump through, but the end result is so much faster at producing web pages that I now want to move this site to this new-to-me architecture.

To do so, I suspect that I'll have to move to a new hosting arrangement, one that will cost me more. To offset that cost, I'm actually looking at selling ads on this site for the first time in its twelve year run. Ads, on emuu.net. Oh yes, all in the name of interesting software architecture.