I enabled APC this afternoon. In my haste to set the webserver up when moving, I never bothered to do a “good” configuration. (I used this handy guide to APC on Debian Etch.) Some super-quick benchmarks (using ab with 1000 connections, 5 concurrent) are below.

Before APC:

• blogs.n1zyy.com/ (main page custom code): 187.03 requests/sec., 5.347 ms. average response time.
• blogs.n1zyy.com/n1zyy (generated by WordPress): 137.23 requests/sec., 7.287 ms. average response time.

After APC:

• blogs.n1zyy.com/ (main page custom code): 416.26 requests/sec., 2.402 ms. average response time
• blogs.n1zyy.com/n1zyy (generated by WordPress): 373.47 requests/sec., 2.678 ms. average response time.

The performance has more than doubled with such a simple fix. It hasn’t been very carefully tuned yet, so there’s probably still more room for improvement… My Someday/Maybe list now includes looking into using APC instead of memcached to cache generated versions of the main page, as performance is apparently even better, as well as seeing that WordPress itself is tweaked to take advantage of APC, which I think is an option somewhere…

There may be problems with APC and the blog’s internal caching (via WP Super Cache) not playing nicely together, but I haven’t seen any reports of that in a while, and all looks well here… Let me know if you see problems.

Okay, it’s officially an addiction. I added some more themes. Bloggers, the “Design” tab in your directory now has 229 themes. The upgrade to WPMU 2.6 seems to have split them over multiple pages (versus having 229 in a row), though I do miss my old quick-nav link to the letter you were looking for. It also adds a live-preview with AJAX-y goodness, so trying themes out is slightly less laborious.

I’m still looking for a good one for my blog. It needs to work with lots of (nested) pages, but most themes weren’t built for this type of thing and tend to look awful. (The main page is due for an update, too, but that’s a task for another day.)