I was recently doing some clean-up on the content of the database-driven version of Benchmarks. One of the issues I was attempting to address was the presence of odd characters in the content. This is an attempt to explain how to discover what these characters are and how to find them.
Continue reading Character confusion: Odd characters on a web page
Slow on the draw
Some of our users were complaining of slow performance on one of our web-based utilities. There are, unfortunately, a number of factors that can affect system performance. I haven’t spent much time learning the best practices for profiling a system to discover the source of bottlenecks, but my hunch was that the problem was in MySQL.