May 302013
 

Give up MacBook Pro to someone else, and moved back to PC laptop.

I was thinking of running Ubuntu on the new laptop so to fully utilize the 16G memory and 4-core i7 processor. However, after two days’ painful trial, I finally gave up and moved back to Windows, and you can image – I moved back to Windows 7 instead of 8.

The problem with Ubuntu and Windows 8 are similar, they were not designed by following people’s common sense, or direct sense, whatever you want to name it. I, personally, believe the usability is OSX > Windows 7 (Windows XP as well) > Ubuntu (Windows Vista is almost the same) > Windows 8.

Heard of Windows 8 is to be upgraded to have something like start button and program folders, etc. though it is still rumor so far. Shall we just name these changes as “graceful downgrade” in case they are really true? ๐Ÿ˜€

BTW, I turned on Hyper-Thread on i7 processor so logically, I’m running a 8-core machine with 16G memory – this is my dreaming machine several years ago ๐Ÿ˜‰

Apr 182012
 

I installed tsocks on OSX through macport and it kept reporting “Segmentation fault: 11” for whatever command I issue, later on turned out I need to put “tordns_enable = false” in tsocks.conf to solve the problem.

Don’t know why, and I told myself – don’t dig into things that don’t matter your core business, hehe.

Dec 082009
 

Testing a prototype that uses Cassandra as the back end storage, the simple application is doing user authentication stuffs, it logs in and then get user’s profile and then show details on the web page.

I hit performance problem with buddy related operation – every user may have 0~20 buddies, I want to show each buddy’s last login time on the result page, and actually I’ve retrieve everything for those buddies. The most direct implementation as I did first, is using user object to get data back, obviously this is not good as for every user object, client needs to access Cassandra cluster to get data back, the TCP round trip would be a pain.

Then I added something to user object’s constructor, which load all buddies info in one shot (Cassandra’s multiget_slice API), things are getting better but this doesn’t seems reasonable to me as for most time, we don’t need buddy info (such as authentication), and getting buddies info back is just a waste of time.

So I added a new method to the user class, called load_buddies, this will load buddies info on-demand. This makes authentication pretty fast, but still keep the ability of loading buddies info in batch mode.

After all these the performance is … still not good, my test case is one login failure every ten requests, and for successfully logged user, I should buddy id and last access time, and also change the user’s last login time. The performance, with my current setting, the worst response time is about a second, while 90% request were done in less than 600ms.

There must be something can be tuned, though VM could be the reason of slowness. I will check following stuffs:

  • Apache HTTPd configuration, it seems prefork is performing better than worker, there may be more can be tuned include both HTTPd and wsgi
  • Python class optimization, I will review the implementation of user class, as I don’t want to make user class too complicated to be used
  • Cassandra performance, actually this is what I’m worrying about, as during the tests, Cassandra boxes’ CPU utilization is about 80% – 70% on user, 10% on sys, roughly, it could be the bottleneck

Without the buddy operation everything’s fine – the worst response time is about 600 ms while 90% requests are below 400ms. Relationship is a pain, it’s the bottleneck, but in this social era, there is no web application can live without relationship …

BTW, my testing environment:

  • Test client running on PowerBook, using ab – I will check if there is anything else can be useful
  • Servers are all running on same physical box controlled by proxmox, this includes a web server, a LVS director (to load balance Cassandra nodes), and 3 Cassandra nodes
  • The server box uses Ethernet, PowerBook is on wireless. I don’t think there is any issue for this as connect time is pretty low.
Oct 282009
 

Seems the PowerBook is the last Unix system that does not have the right uid for myself, but obviously changing uid is totally different from Linux/FreeBSD.

Here is the source and it tells using dscl, and found dscl can do almost all user/group management, and could be more, but I don’t need more :P.

 Posted by at 21:37  Tagged with: ,
May 232009
 

Finished HelloWorld with Objective-C on Mac using Xcode, everything seems fine, though I know hello world is always simple and easy.

It seems to me Objective-C is something similar to smalltalk, but I’m not quite sure as I’m not familiar with smalltalk either. Anyway the syntax is sort of weird to me, as it does not like a procedure/function oriented language, but more like a functional one.

I will keep play with Xcode for sometime during this long weekend, and back to my PPCam (Ada on Windows using GNAT) next week – again, it is not just as simple as hello world, get to spend more time to get things done.