FastStone 3.0 – even better

New version of FastStone Image Viewer – my favorite image viewer – just came out. I really admire the author – he managed to create a greatest piece of software I’ve ever seen in image processing area. ACDSee was a similar piece once – but then it tried to compete with PhotoShop and failed as a viewer immediately. IrfanView is fast… but the rendering quality could be better. But FastStone is simply great.

Apache MPMs for dummies

Performance tuning has always been famous for being one of the best ways to learn lots of things quickly. Yesterday I found out a lot about Apache MPMs (multi-processing modules) – pluggable cores of the server in fact, the most important 2.x version enhancement. There are several of those, and they can seriously affect performance. In particular, there are two most common for Linux:

• Prefork, processing each request with its own process
• Worker, using several multi-threaded request processors

Worker is believed to be faster… if it works, and this is not always true. It didn’t work for me apparently – mod_neko just hangs and does nothing when processing a request. So had to fallback to classic prefork scheme for now.

A great source of documentation about this stuff is, of course, official Apache website – thanks guys for detailed explanations and performance tips!

Road to FastCGI

We’ve been playing today with different ways to speed up our web server, and an important thing to learn was the price of CGI processing scheme. Well, I knew that in theory, but real measurement matters a lot. We are using Apache 2.2 with mod_neko (custom module to integrate with Neko virtual machine), and mod_neko has a way to keep state across request (effectively run in FastCGI mode as you don’t need to re-initialize VM and do all this hassle for every HTTP request coming). When we enabled that, we got 5 times faster processing! This looks amazing for me. Real stress testing is still pending, but I love the results so far!

Why ‘road to FastCGI’, you might ask? Well, I was thinking to implement FastCGI support for Neko myself – and looks like I don’t need it after all…

Network slowdown proxies

Recently I’ve met a problem: I need to test my web application in extremely low bandwidth conditions (like old modems, GPRS mobile connections and so on). I know there are some tools to simulate that – but as usual, details are missing. So here are my findings – these might be of help for someone.

I’ve found two tools:

• Sloppy
• Charles

The first one is a basic network slowdown proxy which does not require installation, you only need to have Java Web Start installed and you’re done. It offers a limited socket redirection functionality but… it does not seem to support POST requests (or I never figured out why.. Or my Flash application didn’t work with it… Don’t know exactly in fact). And it is free.

The second one, Charles, is actually much more than a network slowdown tool. It is a full HTTP debugging proxy, as author says, and this seems to be true. You can limit bandwidth, monitor and analyze traffic, apply filters – lots of useful stuff. There are only two problems:

• it is not free ($50 single user license)
• it hangs sometimes (not good especially for a non-free application)

But… it works for me (not very reliably, although), so – Charles is my choice for now.

ICQ revolution

I’ve finally made the change I’ve tried to make for quite a long time: I’m no longer using plain old buggy ICQ 2003b! I’ve switched to QIP, a brand new ICQ client appeared recently.  And I managed to solve the main problem I was facing: how to convert history. It is a two-step process:

1. Get an official converter from ICQ and convert your History Database to ICQ 2005 format (took about 20 mins for me)
2. Get a QIP history converter and convert your ICQ 2005 history to QIP one (another half an hour)

Everything went smoothly finally but several files (in ICQ 2005, history is stored one-file-per-user-per-month) were not processed due to invalid symbols there… Fortunately the ones I didn’t need much.

Anyway, now I’m a new happy QIP user and life looks just a bit nicer…

Welcome

Ok, I’ve finally made this blog. I see it mostly as a technology one, but absolutely random topics are expected here as well.