I recently migrated this web site to a virtual server at the Rackspace Cloud. I started with the cheapest, 256M slice, but after hitting some performance issues really quickly, I figured that the extra $10/month to grow the slice to 512M was worthwhile. Even so, I don’t think MySQL and Apache are tuned, out-of-the-box, for such “small” systems.
I am running WordPress, a PHP application, on Apache and MySQL, running on CentOS. I am using Munin to track the system health. Since MySQL performance tuning can be extremely complicated I have focussed my initial efforts on Apache.
So, the memory graph would ideally top out at 512MB, but in practice, the system and programs allocate excess memory they rarely touch, and that gets paged out to swap. It is when the swap activity gets high that system performance goes to heck. A spike in system load is a good symptom of possible performance issues.
When things went bad on Wednesday, I tuned Apache down somewhat from the defaults and then enabled the Apache status page, and told Munin to go ahead and graph that. I am new to Munin, but Slicehost has some excellent articles on installing and configuring it in my environment.
This morning Munin sent me e-mail that it was having trouble collecting data, so I took a look, and reset performance values for Apache based on the above graph:
Hopefully, this will hold. I would love to audit the system memory use in greater detail to allow Apache some greater flexibility, but in the interests of achieving a stable system quickly, this will hopefully prove to be a good strategy.
So, occasionally someone asks “well, what will we replace Facebook with?” We don’t really need to replace it right away, but there are some NYU kids who figure it would be a fun project to build a distributed social network where you get your own little “seed” site on a server somewhere, and you can connect with your friends, determining what you intend to share with whom. It sounds totally doable, though who knows if they’ll actually manage to execute and gain traction.
They asked the Internet for $10,000 via KickStarter. So far they have been pledged $174,915. $25 of that is mine. I guess they won’t fail for lack of interest or money. Go go underdogs! :)
Oh, and if you’ve been tempted to ditch Facebook, but didn’t want to be the only crazy dweeb out there, you can join just over 6,000 other folks planning to quit on May 31: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
Yes, I still use mutt. The killer feature it has over Gmail is that I can go through my old messages in forward-chronological order. That and I don’t have to hack my web browsers to display plain text messages in a monospace font. But, in order to use mutt with all the latest and greatest patches, I had to apt-get install mutt-patched.
It is convenient that they maintain a package with all the patches. Unfortunately, when I fired up mutt it had this ugly left-pane, like it wanted to be Outlook or something? So, I did a little research and tracked the sidebar to its source:
Unfortunately, though, mutt lacks an important feature that most email clients do have: a folder list that allows you to see all mail folders you have and how many (new) emails they each contain.
One person’s important feature is another person’s nuisance, but further down the page I found the config to turn the thing off:
On my way back from the Post Office around 11:30 I passed a big police tape scene on Franklin Ave at Lincoln Pl. I saw a small river of blood on the sidewalk next to a dropped shopping bag. A neighbor tells me that he heard five shots and a passing fire truck stopped and had police on the scene in two minutes. I assume the victim is in an ER somewhere and I hope he’ll be okay. The neighbor says that is one of the places where people from outside of the neighborhood like to hang around, and he always walks past there quickly, because although they aren’t aiming at him, they don’t have weapons training and he doesn’t like to be around poorly-aimed bullets.
Update, via Save Brooklyn Now!: At around 10:56am, a 34 year old black male was shot in the head, pronounced Dead on Arrival at Kings County Hospital.
Of course, Google wouldn’t be spotting a trend for this search item if you didn’t have to use Google to figure out how to delete your Facebook account. CNN credits Danny Sullivan for noting this trend.
To a discussion as to preferred password manager solutions, I added the following:
I developed a simple algorithm I use to generate passwords using my brain. I have changed this algorithm a little a few times. At the most basic level, something like this would be you like to use the password “frog” . . . but then add the first two letters of the web site name: Yahoo -> frogya, Google -> froggo.
The benefits of this “password manager” are that as long as your brain functions appropriately, you will always have platform-independent access to your passwords. If any given password is compromised it is non-obvious to an attacker what your other passwords are.
The main drawback to this password manager is that different password policies are mutually exclusive: one site requires a special character, another site prohibits special characters.
I use a different algorithm for more complex passwords for important stuff like ssh keys and unix logins.
I love Metric, but I think for human purposes, Fahrenheit is more useful, and actually closer to the convenience of metric:
Celsius:
0: water freezes
100: water boils
Fahrenheit:
0: colder than Denmark
100: warmer than human blood
If I want to boil and freeze water: hell yeah, Celsius. But if I want to know how hot or cold it is outside, explain it to me in terms I can understand!
After some transient disk issues I was stuck with an Ubuntu VMWare image that was brain dead. I figured I would give the install CD a chance to fix but the Ubuntu install CD doesn’t have a fix-it option. (Really?!) Since the issue was somewhere in how Gnome and X were configured, I launched an xterm session and managed this command:
You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?
Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.
Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.
Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.
And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.
So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.
If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)
