Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

No sooner than I think everything’s going smoothly, after I finished up my post last night, I discovered that the Blog and Forum were bogging down again.

One second response or less to display a webpage should be the norm. Two seconds should be the worst-case maximum. Four is too long. 10 is unbearable and indicative of a problem.

I never did find out the reason for the last slowdown that I talked about in my June 5th post, but it is happening again. Displaying the blog or forum has had a significant number of “too long” and “unbearable response” times up to 60 seconds.

I’m investigating and hope to have a solution soon. I see that the mySQL server they have me on gets over 1000 requests a second! That’s a lot, but normally the server handles it. It could be that they have some sites that occasionally get a popular link and thousands of hits come over short time periods and the database server overloads. But I don’t know yet.

In any case, the rest of the site works fine and is fast enough, so not all is bad.

I’ve finished the new Behold Download page, so now all the Behold site webpages are now at beholdgenealogy. The download page was trickiest because I had to change all the scripts to PHP and convert the Access database to mySQL. There’s still a few tweaks left (like getting it all to look the same in IE6), but it’s effectively done.

Now the website is made from HTML, CSS, PHP and mySQL. This means I am no longer limited to a Windows host, but can go to Unix if the need requires. However, staying on Windows for now is advantageous, since I have duplicated the site on my own machine (with an installed Webserver, PHP, mySQL and phpMyAdmin) and can develop and test without affecting the actual site. I also have my own machine as a complete backup of my online site, in case a disaster takes place at the host.

After 11 years online, this brief hiatus from Behold has allowed me to modernize to the new website technologies that have started taking off. This includes PHP, mySQL, WordPress and bbPress. Their community is exploding and I now am up to speed with them.

There is still one thing to finish off. Over the last three weeks, I’ve also been finishing up a project I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s a replacement for my Genealogy Software Links page and will become a Genealogy Software Review site, which will allow you to add your ratings and reviews of the genealogy programs you have used. I’m looking forward to making that basically a user-driven site, so that I can see what everyone likes and doesn’t like in their programs, and that knowledge will help the future direction of Behold.

Expect the new site up probably this weekend. I’ll announce it here on this blog, and also send out some press releases to some of the genealogy mavens.

Earlier this week, I finished and put up two of the last three webpages for this new site. Those were the Feedback and Buy Now pages. All that was left now was the Download page. That was going to be the trickiest because it involves a few web scripts and programs to allow calculating and emailing the trial key.

But what I discovered while I was trying to implement a check for valid email addresses was that IXWebhosting does not allow programs to be executed on their Windows servers. This means the PHP “exec” statement will not work, and compiled CGI programs (which I built using Delphi) in the cgi-bin directory will not be executed.

I was not pleased to find this out, especially when I was so near to having this all finished. So the key generation could no longer be done with my pre-compiled program that used the same code that Behold uses. I liked doing that because it guaranteed that the keys would always be generated the same way.

Other than finding a new host, which I’m not going to do right now, I’m going to have to rewrite all that code in PHP and very thoroughly check all of it to ensure it works exactly as it does in Behold. It’s unfortunate that I have to go through this work, but looking on the bright side, I can see some potential advantages of having it in PHP rather than in an executable, and I’m hoping I can have it finished within a week.

My mailing list, which was a ASP and Microsoft Access based tool on lkessler.com did manage to copy over and work right away on IXWebhosting. That is probably the only part of this web move that has. But it is the last remant of ASP and Access that I am using, and it may prove advantageous to convert that over to PHP and mySQL as well. Then everything will be integrated and accessible from the PHP scripts which may be better in the long term. Not only that, but I will no longer be tied to needing a Windows Hosting Service if I decide or need to change again.

So just a little more pain, for potential long-term gain.