I bet you have already heard about MogileFS if you are reading this article. MogileFS is an open-source and distributed file system that offers many good properties and features that are hard to find in some of the expensive and proprietary file systems currently available.

MogileFS is a perfect choice for your next storage system if you are planning to build a high-scale service with large storage requirements that is capable of being distributed to multiple servers and low-cost hard drives. It features excellent fail-over capabilities that can be set up using Linux open-source HA project – and there are quite a few projects and solutions are available. MogileFS high-availability storage can be run on simple PC hardware in non-RAID configuration. No hardware RAID is required, because MogileFS provides full fail-over – it replicates data between multiple devices. If one server dies the MogileFS continues working without problems. This saves thousands of dollars and provides HORIZONTAL SCALABILITY from small to large projects that require large storage space and high availability at the lowest possible cost.

You can set up MogileFS replication based on predefined classes and replicate files that are important. Files that are generated from the sources – for example, resized thumbnails – can be easily regenerated from your applications if the disk or server hardware fails.

MogileFS is not POSIX compliant and thus must be implemented in your applications from the very beginning. Multiple APIs are available for PHP, Perl and Python languages, and implementation is quite trivial.

You only need a minimum of two servers to run MogileFS – trackers can be run on the same server where storage nodes are running; however, 4 boxes are preferred and trackers need to be set up in high availability.

MogileFS can be set up in any number of storage servers horizontally that provide high-availability and load balancing, and it is a much better alternative to the widely used NFS, which has many problems.

Have you seen a webpage that starts to load somewhat strangely in your browser and after a couple of seconds the design changes? Or the page loading stalls for a few seconds and then loads fine?

It’s important to correctly position the external file calls to Stylesheet and JavaScript files.

Rule #1. Move all JavaScript external file calls to the bottom of your HTML code.

Rule #2. Move all StyleSheets external file calls to the top of your HTML code.

There are of course a few exceptions – for example, if you have a specific Javascript code that calls up an ad or specific block to display. In this case you will call the external file from the right place in your source. Another case can be some specific timer that can’t have a delay until the full page loads.

Always remember to have as few external include calls as possible. The more website content that can be cached, the better speeds it will provide, generally.