Aww... my bees.

Life, The Universe, And Everything Status Report

I hate everyone.  I'm going to bed.

(As I hinted in my earlier post, I'm being kicked out of New Pixy Central, because the place is being sold.  Again.  I promptly got on the internet and looked for a new place to live.  There's nothing remotely suitable in the area.  The block I live on must have a hundred town houses - I live in a complex of 18, and there's similar complexes each side and an even bigger one behind, and more down the road - and not one of them is available for lease at the moment.  I did find two brand new townhouses, both larger, nicer, and cheaper than my current place.  Unfortunately, one's in Bowral and the other's in Ringwood.  Bah.)

(Actually, I'd happily move to Bowral, except they only have Telstra for internet.  Telstra.  Fuck.  The number one go-to telecommunications company, if you're looking for absurd prices and obsolete technology.  I could get iiNet or Exetel on a Telstra line.  It'd be slow, but significantly less sucky than Telstra themselves.  Sigh.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:06 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Minx Status Report

I have 1.2 working with CherryPy 3.1 on the test system; porting to the new release was pretty painless.

Still testing and ironing out a few bugs, but the release is coming soon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy's Real Estate Tip Of The Day

It's never a good sign when your landlord suddenly starts taking an interest in maintenance.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:07 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Erk

Someone who knows what they're doing (i.e. not any of the hundreds of PC hardware review sites) got their hands on one of those cheap new OCZ Core Series SSDs and tested it.

The results are mixed.

Sequential reads are excellent - 126MB/s average.
Sequential writes are good - 46MB/s average.
Random reads are superb - over 2000 IOPS for 8K pages (a regular disk drive gives you about 100).
Random writes are appalling - 4 IOPS.

That is very very strange.  Random writes are slow on flash because of the block erase structure, but 250ms?  That's worse than slow, that's very slow indeed.

I think I'll still get mine - I have one on order, but only small quantities of the drives have reached Australia and mine is still somewhere in the Pacific - and independently verify those results.  And then beat the SSD market over the head with them.  (Or not, if things turn out different.)

Update: OCZ have published a new and more detailed datasheet, which shows benchmark results of 2500 IOPS for random reads and 500 IOPS for random writes.  500 IOPS is fine; that's the equivalent performance of a 4-disk RAID-0 array (or two disks if you're using expensive SAS drives) on one small cheap module.  

A 15,000 RPM SAS 146GB drive is about the same price as the OCZ 64GB SSD, but to get the same performance and reliability you'd need 4 of them (RAID-10), so if the SSD can deliver, it's still a win.  (And that's write performance - to match the read performance you'd need a 10-disk SAS array, or 20 SATA drives.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Need New Alphabet

3 internal drives.
3 external drives.
5 network drives.
1 optical drive.
2 virtual optical drives.
1 iPod.
4 flash card slots.
1 hot-swap SATA dock.

I'm rapidly running out of letters here!

I wonder if installing the Japanese language pack will help...

I have to say, the hot-swap SATA dock is pretty neat.  (It's one of these.)  Forget burning DVDs for backup.  I have about a dozen old SATA drives lying around.  Drop one in the docking bay, drag your files across, and just wander off while it copies.  Now if only there were a decent rsync for Windows.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:17 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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No-One Tells Me These Things...

Capitol Square.

Ten minute's walk from my office (if that), the old building has been redeveloped and now contains 21 computer stores.  I wondered why all the small computer stores near my office had closed down - they haven't, they've just moved.

And a Japanese restaurant, a Japanese computer game store, and a gashapon arcade.

I'll have to wander over there next week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:38 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Detuned For Speed

An Instalanche at mu.nu is nothing new; we've coped with many a 'lanche over the years.

But an Instalanche combined with AVG 8's accidental DDoS and CPanel's screwed up Apache builder was too much for us.  The server was coping just fine, but you had to stand in line waiting for a connection.

The cure?  Smack keepalive over the head, hard.  What was happening was that random Instapundit reader comes along and sees link to Protein Wisdom.  Follows link.  AVG 8 says Aha!  A web page!  Potential danger!  And follows twenty links from that page in parallel.

And, more often than not, grabs 20 links from the monthly archive listing, so it hits Protein Wisdom 20 more times.  And then the keepalive timeout sits there holding the connection open, so that a single visitor to the blog is using up 300MB of precious server RAM.

I tried just increasing the number of available threads, but Apache has now been compiled with a hard limit of 256.  This wasn't true before; it's a new twist the friendly idiots at CPanel seem to have thrown into the mix.

So, instead, I aggressively de-optomised keepalive.  The timeout is now 2 seconds, and there's a maximum of 5 requests before it drops the connection.  That seems to have brought us sufficient breathing space until I can get some sites spun off to Sakura.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1000 IOPS Or Bust

I ordered a 64GB SSD today - an OCZ Core Series drive, which is substantially cheaper than what has come before.  Roughly in price parity with SD cards, but much faster - the quoted speeds are 120MB/sec for reads and 80MB/sec for writes.

What I'm really interested in, though, is random write performance, not sequential writes.  Assuming that the internal erase block size is 64KB, and that writing random full blocks is no different than writing sequential full blocks (and for flash memory, there shouldn't be any difference), 80MB/sec represents 1250 IOPS.  That's equal to a 10- or 12- drive array of standard 7200RPM SATA drives.

If it delivers on that, not only will I be very happy, I'll be ordering a few more for the servers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Distribution In Place; Need Content

Just finished wiring up the CDN functions.

Look for it - and the rest of 1.2* - next week.

* May not actually include all of 1.2.  Content may settle in shipping.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Gotcha, Evil SQL Monkeys!

Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
87kb generated in CPU 0.07, elapsed 0.0883 seconds.
67 queries taking 0.0331 seconds, 236 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.2b1.

Before an evening's hackery, it looked more like:

Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
87kb generated in CPU 0.08, elapsed 0.2439 seconds.
92 queries taking 0.1803 seconds, 261 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.2a12.

All in all, a worthwhile effort, methinks.

But optimising queries for MySQL really is a black art.

Actually, come to think of it, I didn't set up those new queries so they can be cached.  Let me fix that as well...

Okay.  A little less elegant, but 10% faster:

Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
87kb generated in CPU 0.06, elapsed 0.0809 seconds.
67 queries taking 0.0256 seconds, 236 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.2b1.

Every microsecond counts!

Overall, the Minx 1.2 beta is about 5% faster than Minx 1.1.  The engine is 10% faster, but the queries are 20% slower.  (Though I do have one more optimisation to throw in there.)

Given all the extra baggage it's carrying around - the template language has grown from 462 commands to 1634, and the codebase has grown by 40% - that's not too shabby.

Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
89kb generated in CPU 0.07, elapsed 0.0843 seconds.
62 queries taking 0.021 seconds, 233 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.1-aoi.

I do have to remember to make two minor but counter-intuitive index changes before I roll out the new release.  A strange beast is MySQL.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Two-Edged Sword Of The Day

Is CPanel's auto-updater.  Unlike Microsoft's evil incarnation of this idea, it doesn't take out your entire computer.  What it did do - in this instance, the first time in the four years I've been running it - was get stuck in the middle of an update and leave phpMyAdmin mysteriously broken.

Killed the stuck update, forced a new update, and it was fixed.  After an hour wasted trying ever sensible option...

So if your mee.nu site bobbled briefly today, well, that was me.

Update: And if your mu.nu site exploded into tiny flaming pieces today, well, that was me too.  Adding one small PHP module turned into three hours of hell, thanks very much to CPanel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just As An Aside

GMail's magic URL parser doesn't recognise the CC TLD's for Saint Helena or Montenegro as being, well, CC TLD's.

But it does recognise the CC TLD's for Ascension Island and the British Indian Ocean Territory.

You may ask me how I know this.  My answer may have something to do with plans for mee-related world domination.  Also, bitterness at having missed out on Tuvalu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Global Warming Come Home!

All is forgiven!

It's 13C here in Sydney.

Indoors.

With the heater on.

I think I need to fire up my old PCs again.  At least they kept my toes warm.  These new energy efficient models suck in Winter.

Update: Back to normal Sydney Winter weather today, i.e. short sleeves and air conditioning, with intermittent showers of religious fruitcakes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Today's Toys

More toys for the expanding m(u|ee)nuvian empire:

• Just shy of 100,000 icons from glyFX, an Australian graphic design company.  Admittedly, that counts all sizes, formats, and colour variations, but it's still a lot of nice icons at a good price.  Now I just need to work out what to do with them...
• A new server, which will probably be called Sakura.  This is hosted at a different company* and doesn't have quite the power of Aoi and Midori, but it has lots of memory and disk space and is cheap.  It will be used for the random freebie hosting I do (distinct from mu.nu and mee.nu) to reduce the load on Midori, and for offsite backups to reduce the load on my ADSL.

Now I just have to chase down my Adobe CS3.3 update and my Eye Candy bundle** and I'll have everything.  Oh, and have to order the amCharts graphing module.  Can't forget that.

* But still in Dallas.  Nobody bomb Dallas!
** Eye Candy is on its way.  Again.  Apparently it got lost the first time and went back home...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Green Ring Of Death

After my Compaq Presario notebook coughed and died just weeks out of warranty, I went out and got a shiny new HP Pavilion notebook to replace it.  Which is basically the same thing, except shinier and newer.

One of the shiny new features was that it has a proper dedicated Nvidia 8400 graphics controller, instead of the embedded ATI graphics on the Presario.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:28 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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For The Terminally Insecure

- or those who simply forget from time to time who their blog belongs to - I just nabbed mee.me.

(I also have mee.fm, mee.gs, mee.im, mee.li, mee.ms, and mee.vg in case anyone wants to use those.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:47 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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