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Sat Sep 01 18:19:33 2007 GMT: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Panic
Tue Aug 28 18:50:04 2007 GMT: Open Source Hosting That Sucks Less
Mon Aug 20 21:18:56 2007 GMT: Why LAMP Sucks
Undoubtedly, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is an extremely popular web server software bundle. But it also has some drawbacks, particularly if you choose to run PHP as an Apache module. On first thought, this configuration should help improve performance as your PHP script run in the same process space as the web server. But the downside is that every httpd process carries all the PHP baggage resulting in vastly increased memory consumption (even if only a fraction of the total HTTP requests requires PHP processing).
And if you are unlucky enough to offer a few files for downloading, it gets even worse as some download managers/accelerators try to be extremely clever by opening several concurrent connections to download a file in parallel. So in essence, you might end up having a separate process with a full PHP interpreter just for doing a sendfile syscall (or maybe a combination of read/send syscalls). Using approximately 20 MB per connection doesn't sound that sexy, does it?
Well, the Open Watcom server was brought down this weekend by a single downloader who tried to be clever by opening as many connections as possible (with a limit of 250 connections in Apache's configuration). This was already too much for the machine with "just" 1 GB of RAM... (btw, Apache has now been limited to only 50 concurrent connections)
From a technical point of view, the cleanest solution would probably be to install lighttpd and use PHP via FastCGI. My guess would be that in this case an HTTP connection will only consume a couple of kBs on the server side (unless, of course, it needs to be passed to the PHP interpreter - but there shouldn't be a multi-MB penalty for serving static content).
Mon Aug 06 16:54:33 2007 GMT: Summer in the City: Carnaval del Pueblo
Yesterday I enjoyed the Carnaval del Pueblo in Burgess Park, London. The weather (probably the hottest weekend this summer) was as good as the Latin American music...
Wed Aug 01 18:25:58 2007 GMT: Alcatel-Lucent's Q2 Results
In case you have missed it, Alcatel-Lucent posted its 2nd quarter results on Tuesday, see the official announcement from Alcatel-Lucent, Network World: Merger costs dog Alcatel-Lucent in Q2, The Register: Merger costs, flat sales hit Alcatel-Lucent, Forbes: Alcatel-Lucent's Wedding Woes, IHT: Alcatel-Lucent posts 2nd-quarter loss and IHT: Alcatel-Lucent loss worse than expected.
Sat Jul 28 10:56:26 2007 GMT: Weather
After last year's exceptionally hot July we now have record-breaking rainfall figures this year and the Met Office has issues another severe weather warning for southern England this weekend...
Thu Jul 12 20:14:09 2007 GMT: We've Dropped Our Prices
Last month my electricity bill arrived with a leaflet "WE'VE DROPPED OUR PRICES" (Electricity price drop from 1 April 2007). But the bill actually still showed the old higher prices, so I e-mailed them just to be told that my expectation for a reduction on the current bill was wrong. They further explained that the price drop would only take effect from the next quarterly bill.
I hope I am not supposed to understand that, in particular as that's not even mentioned in the small print. They might have made a "business decision to implement the decrease on the next quarterly bill" (as they have put it), but I have now also made a decision to switch electricity suppliers...
Wed Jul 04 18:58:25 2007 GMT: OpenID
Sun Jul 01 09:17:28 2007 GMT: Lake District Holiday
Tue Jun 12 18:56:54 2007 GMT: Google's Response to The Article 29 Working Party Letter
Sun Jun 10 11:24:12 2007 GMT: New Intel and Sun C++ Compiler Versions
Mon May 28 21:43:07 2007 GMT: Google's misleading response to privacy concerns
