Sep 302009
 

Beer, Live show (through Internet), junk food … time to celebrate National Day.

60 years, good luck to my country and all Chinese around the world.

 Posted by at 18:50  Tagged with:
Sep 252009
 

I know I didn’t post a lot on what got changed in my daily life, I was just too busy (on some B.S. projects) to mentioned them.

Well, let’s see what’s new in the past month or so:

  • A guinea pig, his name is “Snowy” as he’s pure white, I know he does not like me too much as I went to sleep very late recently, and all light and my steps bothered his sleep for sure
  • Nikon D3000 – finally started DSLR life, and though I was thinking I will play with basic len for a year or so, I now want to have another len … proved people are greedy, for all the time
  • iRobot Roomba – the robot vacuum which will keep the house clean, especially after Snowy’s here, or ya, Snowy is just couple of months old, he does not have good habit to keep his place tidy
  • Wii Sport Resort – I like swordplay the most ๐Ÿ˜€

OK pretty much.

I think I started shopping season earlier than others ๐Ÿ˜› .

Sep 252009
 

There was not much progress with performance test as mentioned here.

I first did test with LDAP vs. memcached, then found there was not much difference between those two, which is suspicious, so I started running test to compare pure database and memcached solution, which ideally should show lot of difference, but I failed.

I still haven’t figured out what was the real cause, it seems VM is not that good to do this kind of test – thinking of limited resource (CPU, mem, network, disk, etc), all VMs will compete each other. Again, this is my guess and I will try to see what would be the best solution to get performance done in VM environment.

Even if I failed, it shows that VM will not be good for performance testing, nice try ๐Ÿ™‚ .

Sep 102009
 

I think I’m a project/feature killer.

Couple of months back I was asked to test performance of feature GMF, and since the performance was really bad (sorry, 10x times slower), so we have to remove that fancy feature from two major systems’ roadmap;

Couple of weeks ago I was asked to test performance of feature TRF, the resource utilization was not that cool (20~40% more resource), so we have to cancel the (again, fancy) feature from all roadmaps;

Couple of hours ago I started to test the new (sure again, fancy) build system, seems the program does not run at all. I don’t want to predict anything but based on my past record … you know it.

Sep 092009
 

I’m going to test two types of authentication system, one is what seems to be common in current days which utilizes database and cache, the popular combination is mysql+memcached, and the other is what I recommended to others for authentication system for all the time – LDAP, and surely openldap is the first choice (Fedora DS is not available on other platforms, though seems it’s easier to manage).

I compose couple of items describing the tests I’m going to take, and I will review this couple of times while I’m doing the setup.

First, application. I had some assumption based on my past experience, that is:

  • Good user
  • 1 authentication (login with right username and password)
  • 10 look up, getting user’s attributes (for showing them on some pages, note that reading these attributes needs to go through couple of tables)
  • 1 edit, such as changing profile
  • Bad user
  • 1 authentication (login with incorrect username or password)

and the ratio of good vs. bad user is 1:5 (yea, lots of abuse …).

There will be 1M registered users, but the “good user” will only include 100K of them, which reflects 10% active users rate, actually this is already high. There will be 3 PHP pages: login.php to do authentication, pref.php retrieve preferences of the user, and edit.php try to change user’s profile. All these take GET query strings so to make test easier.

Environment:

  • database testing environment
  • debian acts as web server, running apache and PHP
  • freebsd acts as client, generating load with apache’s ab
  • centos is mysql’s master, handling both read and write
  • opensuse is mysql’s slave, handling read only, note that we are not using mysql-proxy as it seems to me it is far away from production quality so far
  • ubuntu and fedora run memcached, in TCP mode with 64M cache memory each
  • I’m going to post database schema later on
  • ldap testing environment
  • debian acts as web server, running apache and PHP
  • freebsd acts as client, generating load with apache’s ab
  • ubuntu and fedora are running openldap in mirror mode
  • again, schema will be posted here later on

maybe the only unreal part above is openldap will run in mirror mode, which is not extensible – I will check to see what kind of openldap replication is suitable for production deployment.

Pretty much that’s it, will update once I review this plan.

Sep 082009
 

It took me one and half hour to get to office in the morning, all because of mess on 680.

Based on the bad experience I got all the time from 680, I decided to avoid the regular route I take – Santa Rita onto 580, then 680. Instead, I will take local and then get onto 680 on Sunol, this route is quite stable, though it always takes 20 min, while with my current route, the best is 10 min, and the worst is 40 min.

 Posted by at 10:17  Tagged with:
Sep 032009
 

Debian does not come with a good (I mean, easy to use :D) firewall, and to me ufw on Ubuntu is pretty cool so searched around, found this link:

http://blog.ropetin.com/?p=94

and copy some words here in case someday that URL becomes inaccessible:

# sudo apt-get install python
# wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jamie/ufw/ufw-0.25.tar.gz
# tar -xzvf ufw-0.25.tar.gz
# cd ufw-0.25
# sudo python ./setup.py install

Once installed it needs to be configured, which really depends on your requirements.ย  A basic setup that allows SSH access, while blocking most other access can be configured by;

# sudo ufw logging on
# sudo ufw default deny
# sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 22
# sudo ufw enable

Sep 012009
 

Though I slept for 9 hours last night, I still feel super sleepy now (actually, started from whenever I got on road).

It seems I need to control myself to sleep less, so that to keep myself fresh at office.

 Posted by at 09:59  Tagged with: