Just got back from seeing Dave Gorman perform his "Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stand Up Tour" at De Montfort Hall, Leicester and I haven't laughed so much in a long, long time. Seriously! Dave Gorman is fantastic at what he does. He tells a story with such enthusiasm and when something is annoys him he lets it out. Anyone who has seen The Dave Gorman Collection or Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure will (hopefully) agree.

My favourite part of the show was the bit where he did the thing about the thingy. That was hilarious! Sorry, can't give any more away than that.

The whole two and a half hour (with 20 min interval) show keept me laughing non-stop. To add to the great night Dave was in the lobby signing and having his picture taken. So I have a picture with Dave and a signed ticket that I'll place in ticket collage, right next to my Henry Rollins I think. What a nice guy... you could even say Genius.

Something I've been thinking about doing for a long some and I've finally done it. I've got all my tickets from most of the gigs and events I've been to and I put them into a clip fame. Full sized image.

It's definately a work in progress as there are quite a few white gaps but next week I'll have Dave Gorman to add and this summer I'm going to Download, Silverstone Classic and Sonisphere. Hopefully, I'll be seeing Creed when announce something and possibly Hard Rock Calling (just to see Pearl Jam). They'll help fill it up. Unfortunately I've not got every ticket. What's missing:

• Metallica
• Jimmy Barnes
• Fightstar

Download Festival has just announced 22 bands that will be playing at Donington in June and I can't help but think I'm missing something. I look at the list and see only 8 bands I know and only 2 that I'd actually pay to see, Steel Panther and 36 Crazyfists. It  so happens I have paid to see these two bands before. The other 6 bands I've heard of are Coheed and Cambria, Airbourne, HIM, Dillinger Escape Plan, Whitechapel, and Saxon. I know of these bands but I can't say I listen to any of them on a regular or irregular basis. That said I might be missing out so tomorrow I'll be on Spotify checking these (and all the others in line up) out.

To me the 22 bands doesn't seem that impressive. However Download is such a big festival and has 100s of bands each year so they are covering all the bases with such a varity which is good so long as the one's you want to see don't clash.

In two weeks time I believe it's Sonisphere's turn to announce bands and when that comes I'll post my thoughts on that too. As it stands Download and Sonisphere both have very strong headline acts. But when you go down the line up Sonisphere seems stronger to me.

Anyway, here's a full list of the newly annouced bands.

• Coheed and Cambria
• Airbourne
• HIM
• Dillinger Escape Plan
• Cinderella
• Steel Panther
• We Are The Fallen
• 36 Crazyfists
• A Day To Remember
• Whitechapel
• Hell Yeah
• The Blackout
• Dommin
• Taking Dawn
• Job For A Cowboy
• Saxon
• RATT
• Unearth
• Lawnmower Deth
• Rise To Remain
• August Burns Red
• Y&T

Last night I when to see Steel Panther at the O2 Acadamy Sheffield. The night started off with a one and a half hour wait between getting in the support act starting. I thought that was a bit of a long wait but the night was worth the wait.

The support act were The Sirens. A trio of sexy ladies who did a few burlesque routines to metal songs. They were only on for 15 minutes but I can safely stay every guy in the auidence was extreme pleased.

After a few minutes it was time for Steel Panther. It was probably the most fun gig I've been to. They played most of the songs from their Feel The Steel album which was cool but what was the most fun is what happened between songs. Lots of interaction with the audience, mainly consisting of commenting about hot girls and what they were do to them. Steel Panther manged to get four girls from the crowd up on stage and show their boobs. Yay!

Steel Panther are all about image but the music was really good too. Classic 80s rock with the stylings of bands like Whitesnake, Bon Jovi... I could go on. Community Property was my favourite and had everyone singing along. To be honest people were singing to every song.

The night  was great fun and they annouced they'll be at Download this year.

Here are the three videos I recorded.

1. Eyes of a Panther
2. Asisan Hooker
3. Death to all but Metal

Steel Panther - Feel The Steel Tour Videos

Over the weekend I ran a script to test the time it takes my server to process the home page of nojacko.com. I wasn't testing the time the page took to load but the time the server took to process it. I created a script that ran every 20 minutes, loaded the homepage's html, and grabbed he benchmarking information from the footer (which looks like "Page built in X.XXXX with Y queries & Z caches"). The script would first delete the site's cache and then load the site 10 times. This got the benchmark data for the site with caching as after the first load the site would have been cached. After this the script would again load the site another 10 times but before each load the cache would be deleted, getting the data for the site without cached data. I let this run for most of the weekend and here's my findings.

Something I have to point out is this site is hosted on a shared server (by HostGator who I highly recommend), so server side optimising is left to HostGator. Also other sites share the server so load that they create could have affected the results.

The first finding is easy to see. The site without caching takes 49% longer time to load on average. This is something I guessed would happen because with caching the site doesn't have to connect to the database and query it. The minimum and maximum loading times also show this. The maximum and minimum loading time for caching off was 41% and 75% longer, respectively, then when caching was on. 41-75% is a very noticeable difference. To put it into context if the site was maxing out 3 servers without caching turning caching on would in theory allow the site to run on only 2 servers.

The next thing I noticed was that when the database was being queried the difference between the average and maximum loading times was much higher than when cached. It seems that using a database the loading time is more variable. You can see from the scatter graph below that the cached times are more closely grouped between 0.01 and 0.1 seconds, whereas the non-cached times are more spread out between 0.02 and 0.5 seconds. Also, there were 11 instances of the non-cached site taking more than half a second and only 3 when the site is cached.

So the testing shows caching is worth while. In some cases your might not be able to cache or you might have a fast enough database server that the difference isn't noticeable but there is a good case for it. Increasing speed with caching can also save money and energy consumption as less servers are needed which cost both money and electricity.

I intend to do some more testing in the future. The next set of tests I do will probably be with part or full page caching, where I'll cache html outputs and not just the results of database queries.