IBBoard

As well as very recent work on the Beta Search module for Magic, I've been working on performance improvements for Grots, the CMS over at Skins@HWT. Although the speed improvements won't be restricted to Skins@HWT, they are currently being tested or about to be tested there.

Current performance enhancements of Grots include caching language and skinning into PHP files instead of reading them from the database every time (originally implemented because of the annoying habit of webservers not to have the correct permissions to edit flat files without setting them to 777 - writable by everyone). Also being added is caching of CSS (which can already be done by proxy servers anyway, because of the headers that I pass) and caching of the template into a PHP file.

Add to this a few code changes (such as taking advantage of SQL functions and streamlining code where I can now see I took the long route to the solution) I should hopefully be able to optimise the code even further. Add to this the fact that no-one has been very helpful in my Optimisation of Loops thread on the DevShed forums and that I've not been able to recreate the php.lt benchmark stats and it looks like that'll be the end of most of my optimisations. There would be something to gain from flattening some functions, but just about all of them are for improved reusability and maintenance and so are staying.

In other news, it looks like there could be a new spider that has bypassed the old isSpider() function that I created and use. It hit a lot of my download pages (just about all of them) within a couple of minutes and failed on all of them (because it didn't have a session). It's name is "DTAAgent" and all I can find on it is a post or two on some forums (WebMasterWorld.com I think it was) which say that it might be an IBM development or it resolves to an IP Address owned by British Telephone Directory company 192.com. I'll keep an eye on it and see if any more information emerges.