If you’re running a company mainly occupied with development of lots of web sites ranging from tiny promo sites to large portals you most probably should face deployment headaches some day.

How do folks usually deploy their remote applications? Some use manual deployment via FTP, others prefer using rsync or unison, some brave souls deploy simply by updating the project’s Subversion working copy on the remote server, Rails fans usually stick with Capistrano, some smart fellows are said to be using complicated cfengine, etc.

At my company we were not happy with any mentioned above methods of remote project deployment due to either lack of functionality or unnecessary complexity. We simply needed a tool which could use non-technical personnel: managers, web-designers, etc. That’s why we hacked our own simple utility - meet Syncman

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If you have not already tried using nginx, one of the fastest http and reverse proxy servers in the world, you definitely should try doing so!

Nginx can save lots of CPU cycles simply by “standing” before the main heavy http server(e.g. Apache) and taking the role of serving effectively all static content. Actually it can be your main and the only http server but that’s a story for another day since it will require quite a lot hassle if you already have many virtual hosts served by another server(Apache again).

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As Cranberries put this very question as a title of their debut album, similarly I’m asking myself why not starting yet another blog and if it’s really a good idea to post my personal thoughts to the public Probably not and, who knows, I may abandon this blog in a week but right now I feel inspired(oh, at least I’ll have a chance to practice my English).

You may be asking, why choosing such a title for the blog “My personal blah-blah for efficiency”? Well, you see I’m an efficiency fan. I simply admire people who get things done with a few keystrokes in vim, who can deploy the new version of the application(being under highload) to the web cluster with a minimum of fuss, who have some free time(and good sleep) while developing a >500k LOC application at the primary job and releasing it in time, who…ouch, I can keep on but this post is getting bigger than usual for the “hello world”. Anyway, I guess, you get the idea.

Simply put, this is a blog where I’m going to describe my adventures while trying to achieve better efficiency in every aspect of my life(actually, mostly in software development and *nix administration )