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Mon Sep 24 20:45:51 2007 GMT: edge.cmeerw.net Moved
Sun Sep 16 20:45:33 2007 GMT: Alcatel-Lucent revises sales forecast a third time
Sun Sep 16 20:31:54 2007 GMT: Belgium Holiday
I have added a few pictures of my recent holiday in Belgium to my digital photo album: see Oostende and Brussels and Bruegge.
Sat Sep 01 18:19:33 2007 GMT: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Panic
It has been pretty quiet over IPv4 address space shortage issues during the past few years, but this is apparently about to change: see The Return of the IPv4 Shortage or Net "out of IPv4 addresses by 2011" says Cerf.
Although this is just a few years away, IPv6 is still now widely supported to say the least. In fact, as a consumer it's still pretty difficult to get any kind of IPv6 connectivity - only a select few ISPs already support (native) IPv6 and web hosters appear to still completely ignore IPv6. Well, this is one of the reasons for moving edge.cmeerw.net to a new virtual server in the next few weeks - this time based on Xen with at least IPv6 tunneling support (my current Virtuozzo-based vServer doesn't support IPv6 at all).
Tue Aug 28 18:50:04 2007 GMT: Open Source Hosting That Sucks Less
ETH Zürich offers free hosting of open (and closed) source software projects on its Origo platform. The interesting thing here is that it is not based on any Sourceforge branch, but is built on a Drupal frontend and their own peer-to-peer based backend written in Eiffel. BTW, the Drupal frontend makes it quite similar to my own DevCorner.
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
Sat Jul 28 10:56:26 2007 GMT: Weather
Thu Jul 12 20:14:09 2007 GMT: We've Dropped Our Prices
Wed Jul 04 18:58:25 2007 GMT: OpenID
Sun Jul 01 09:17:28 2007 GMT: Lake District Holiday
