Ever wonder how many requests your $5 a month Digital Ocean server can handle? Using Loader.io’s free load testing tool can help you do just that! It’s a good idea to know what your server can handle so you can be prepared to handle large spikes in traffic. This could mean increasing the specs on your current server, adding a load balancer or using round robin dns to distribute the request to multiple servers. Read More
Round Robin DNS
In a previous post, I’ve covered how I used Digital Ocean’s load balancer to handle the increasing number of request my Weather Extension receives. For weeks everything was going great but about a month ago I started having issues with DO load balancer. Users were receiving 522 (timeouts) errors. DO claimed my servers were the issue. After some testing, I realized that around 1,000 requests a minute, Digital Ocean’s load balancer started failing even though they claim to not limit the number of requests. Read More
Url Shortener Extension
Let’s face it, URLs can be long and with Twitter’s 140 character limit, link shorteners can be very useful. There are several free services but I tend to use T.LY. It’s free, easy to use, and tracks stats like the number of clicks.
To make the process of generating a short URL easier, I created a chrome extension (Chrome|Firefox|Edge|Opera) that uses Google link shortener API to quickly generate a short link and copy it to your clipboard. If you shorten links often, you should check out my chrome extension.
Led Monitor Backlights
With the purchase of my new Dell 34 inch monitor, I decided to add some led backlights to the monitor. I’ve read some of the benefits but wasn’t sure if I would like them.
After a few days of use, I would definitely recommend them to anyone. They are cheap and easy to install. They can be powered from a usb port on the back of your monitor and cut to fit any size monitor. Currently they are on sale if you use the promo code GT8OMP06 at checkout.