These are for techies only. The second question is long, but has been
worrying me a little of late.
1) is there any way to prevent access to an imode site by people who are
faking their HTTP_USER_AGENT, other than doing a (slow) reverse look up to
check the request is coming from a known box? (a docomo box, or
whatever....)
2) smallscreen client traffic patterns. Sites designed to be browsed from
client hardware with small screens are often database driven with dynamic
navigation. Because of small screen size and small cache size the amount
of date sent on each request is typically small. For that same reason the
information is read and acted on quickly by the user - who click a link...
Instead of users spending 45seconds on a page, they may spend 12 seconds.
So, such sites are (presumably) characterised by a large number of
requests for small amounts of data, many of which will be handled
dynamically. So (presumably) lots more hits on the database for a given
user than if they were accessing through a web page assuming (which we
can't, but will for the sake of argument) they read the same amount of
information.
The point is that from the site designer's / system/database designer's
point of view, a site designed to be read from such smallscreen clients
(presumably) has a whole bunch of tradeoffs that are DIFFERENT to the
tradeoffs one might make for a largescreen client site. For example, if
such sites do tend to create a lot more hits on a database one might
accept a lot more data redundancy to simplify lookups and avoid
unnecessary joins .... I would never expect to hit Mysql's lookups/second
limit even on Linux, but it is more possible (at peak) on an imode site....
Does anyone know of any papers that go into these issues in detail?
Can anyone suggest any Apache/Mysql tweaks specifically to improve the
efficiency of serving such smallpage/lotsa-hits sites?
It is the database side that worries me, one can do loadbalancing on the
webserver/scripting language side, but having separate database boxes is
harder unless you design that possible requirement in from the start. I
know there are lots of ways to reduce lookups, pseudo-dynamic pages
created using cron-jobs, etc etc
if you have got this far, thanks for reading
Nick
/ May Ltd. nick@kyushu.com
/ Mitsui Yakuin Heights Suite 903, 2-11-33 Yakuin, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka
/ Japan 810-0022 Tel/Fax 81 (92) 735 7933 090 8835 5602
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Received on Thu Dec 7 06:42:32 2000