Re: load balancing on apache
Jeff Beard wrote: On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Perrin Harkins wrote: I _really_ hate so-called dedicated boxes. They're closed, nasty, inflexible and often don't work in _your_ situation. Doing smart session-based redirection can be hard with these boxes. You can make it work with homegrown solutions, but I've found the dedicated load-balancing tools (at least Big/IP) to be effective and fairly easy to work with, even with large loads, failover requirements, and more exotic stuff like sticky sessions. This is one area where the problem seems to be well enough defined for most people to use an off-the-shelf solution. They're often more expensive than they should be, but if you don't have someone on hand who knows the ipchains or LVS stuff it can save you some time and trouble. I couldn't agree more. In terms of managability and scalability, the various software solutions simply add complexity to something that is already so. I've got some experience with Alteon AceDirectors and even though they seem little flakey at times, you do end up with true load balacing. (We have Cisco's solution deployed and they periodically have issues too.) DNS round-robin should be avoided at all costs. It's half-assed at best. In the case of a failure those clients that have that IP cached are SOL. On some of the systems that I've deployed we have a frontend proxy on the same box as the mod_perl with the mod_perl server listening on 127.0.0.1. This is behind an Alteon (or 2). You can put the proxy on a separate box as well but (I've seen some odd problems with TCP connections not working in this situation which I never fully understood but may have had to do with the Alteon being flakey.) Anyway, my advice is to go with a hardware load balancer/intelligent IP switch. In the long term, it will pay for itself in the time recovered from *not* being spent on troubleshooting complex problems. yes. It's a money vs. time/knowledge thing. Plus the state of the free software available. Anyone care to compare the features and power of some of the opensource projects vs. the Big/IP's? Which are the more promising opensource projects in this area? It would be nice to use an open source solution, or at least be able to offer it as an option, and I'd like to track the progress of some of the more promising projects. Ed Ed
Re: Defeating mod_perl Persistence
Ged Haywood wrote: Hi there, On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Jonathan M. Hollin wrote: When using Mail::Sender only the first email is sent on my mod_perl server. When I investigated, I realised that the socket to the SMTP server was staying open after the completion of that first email (presumably mod_perl is responsible for this persistence). Is there any way to defeat the persistence on the socket while running my script under mod_perl, or do such scripts always need to be mod_cgi? The idea is for the mod_perl process to complete its job and get on with another as quickly as possible. Waiting around for nameserver timeouts and such doesn't help things. You might be better off re-thinking the design for use under mod_perl. This is a well-trodden path, have a browse through the archives. Yes, this has come up before. Ideally you want to separate out your mail service and pass your mails to a queue. Then, wholly independent of your app, your smtp server can negotiate with remote hosts and generally do its thing. That is, you shouldn't even make your app wait for your SMTP server to send an email before you free it to handle the next request. This is analagous to using a proxy server to handle slowish clients. See the guide, archives. Ed
[OT]Re: The DEFINITIVE answer to: How much should I charge?
Tom Mornini wrote: This whole thread can be answered very easily: ANSWER: As much as you can. That's it! That's the entire answer. Nothing else should figure in unless you personally wish to make exceptions for any reason you see fit. Did the people who ask this question grow up and become educated in a part of the world where free markets and capitalism did not exist? Perhaps in socialistic colleges in the U.S.? :-) If you mean when you say, sociailistic colleges, very well funded universities full of tenured radicals, then I'm guilty. ;-) Those were my favorite professors! But, I was never deluded into thinking they had in any sense escaped the money economy. The star tenured radicals such as Fred Jameson for example make as much or more than a very well paid software developer so one must appreciate the ironies. As a freelancer you charge what the market will bear. Besides the extra cost of benefits and the added tax liabilities one must also factor in the assumption of risk if you want to come to a justification for charging 100+ per hour. If you don't feel the need to justify, then you merely say, I charge the market rate. No tenured radical would begrudge you. They know on what side their bread is buttered. ;-) ed
Re: [OT] Re: What hourly rate to charge for programming?
Perrin Harkins wrote: Now take the amount you want to make and divide it by the number of hours you came up with above ($40,000 / 1,000). You get $40. That's your target hourly rate. And despite what they high-flying .com weanies were saying a year ago, that's going to be a nice living for a young guy unless you're smack in the middle of a high-cost area and can't bother to cook your own meals. Don't forget that self-employed people in the US must pay considerably more in social security, as well as covering the full cost of their own health insurance and other needed benefits. $40K as a consultant is much less spendable money than $40K as an employee. - Perrin Yes, that's an additional 7.5% for social security. In addition, you have to take care of your own benefits, etc. Market downturns can be a better time for contract work over full-time, especially since stock options don't mean what they do during an upturn. ;-) And many employers don't have the resources to take on full-time staff. I'd recommend that you start to inch up your rate with new clients, and that you try and see what your market will bear. Your target should be $100+ in the U.S. for basic consulting and more for mod_perl specific work, again if your market will bear it. Good Luck, Ed
Re: [ANNOUNCE] TicketMaster.com sponsors mod_perl development
Congratulations to Stas, mod_perl, and the guide. Excellent! Ed Stas Bekman wrote: If you remember back in the end of April, I've posted to the list an unusual job seek request [1], where I was saying that I want some company to sponsor me to work full time on mod_perl 2.0 development. Believe it or not my unusual request has been answered by Craig McLane from TicketMaster.com (which owns citysearch.com). citysearch.com is a heavy user of mod_perl technology and interested in making sure that mod_perl technology get more and more mature and ensure their business' success. So starting from this September I'm working on mod_perl 2.0 development, a new documentation project (which you are welcome to join) and doing mod_perl advocacy through teaching at the conferences and other ways. Currently the contract is for one year. But if everything goes well, and mod_perl 2.0 rocks the world even better than 1.x did we will see more support and sponsoring from TicketMaster. This email's purpose: - is to set a precedent for other business to sponsor mod_perl and related technologies. There are at least a few excellent developers that I know will jump on the opportunity of being able to do what they love full time. - is to set a precedent for other developers to seek what they really want and read less stories about hi-tech recession, since good developers are always in demand. Therefore I hope that this email will encourage you to do that. Notes: [1] http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/modperl/runvesay _ Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://eXtropia.com/ http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
Re: [ANNOUNCE] TicketMaster.com sponsors mod_perl development
Aaron E. Ross wrote: On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 02:01:31AM +0800, Gunther Birznieks wrote: You can reach your goals. I'm living proof. beefcake. BEEFCAKE!! -- Eric Cartman LOL! sounds like a great project stas! thanks ticketmaster! Yeah. Kudos to Ticketmaster for supporting a great Open Source project.
Re: mod_proxy and mod_perl in guide
Thanks Vivek, Andrei, use the front end to directly handle any binaries, static files, etc. I doubt they are generating of these on the fly. Vivek Khera wrote: AAV == Andrei A Voropaev [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: AAV In our system we have to pass large PDF files thru mod_perl to AAV proxy and we noticed that it takes the same time as sending it AAV directly to customer. Why do you have to pass the PDF thru mod_perl? Are you generating it on the fly? If not, configure your proxy front end to intercept static documents like .pdf .txt .html etc. to be handled by the front end directly. I use mod_rewrite for this, and my configs have been posted to this list at least twice. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Vivek Khera, Ph.D.Khera Communications, Inc. Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rockville, MD +1-240-453-8497 AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera http://www.khera.org/~vivek/
Re: modperl/ASP and MVC design pattern
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Francesco, I believe that Ian was joking, hence the yikes before the name, so the above post is the documentation! Ed .. so the best environment for the MVC++ design pattern is parrot/mod_parrot :) http://www.oreilly.com/news/parrotstory_0401.html Thanks Francesco Exactly! Wasn't Ian the one responsible for the mod_parrot MVC++ API? ed
Re: Can AxKit be used as a Template Engine?
Michael Alan Dorman wrote: Matt Sergeant [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It depends a *lot* on the type of content on your site. The above www.dorado.com is brochureware, so it's not likely to need to be re-styled for lighter browsers, or WebTV, or WAP, or... etc. So your content (I'm guessing) is pure HTML, with Mason used as a fancy way to do SSI, with Mason components for the title bars/menus, and so on. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). It is more sophisticated than that, but you're basically right. I do pull some tagset-like tricks for individual pages, so it's not totally pure HTML, but yeah, if we wanted to do WebTV we'd be fscked. AxKit is just as capable of doing that sort of thing, but where it really shines is to provide the same content in different ways, because you can turn the XML based content into HTML, or WebTV HTML, or WML, or PDF, etc. Ah---well a web site that does all of that isn't what first comes to mind when someone talkes about doing a static site---though now that you've explained further, I believe I understand exactly what you intended. I talk about how the current Perl templating solutions (including Mason) aren't suited to this kind of re-styling in my AxKit talk, which I'm giving at the Perl conference, so go there and come see the talk :-) Heh. I agree entirely with this assesment---I can conceptualize a way to do it in Mason, but the processing overhead would be unfortunate, the amount of handwaving involved would be enormous, and it would probably be rather fragile. So I take back that people wouldn't be using Mason for static content. I was just trying to find a simple way to classify these tools, and to some people (I'd say most people), Mason is more on the dynamic content side of things, and AxKit is more on the static content side of things, but both tools can be used for both types of content. (I hate getting into these things - I wish I'd never brought up Mason or EmbPerl) Well I will say that you made an excellent point that hadn't really occured to me---I use XML + XSL for a lot of stuff (the DTD I use for my resume is a deeply reworked version of one I believe you had posted at one time), but not web sites, in part because I'm not currently obligated to worry about other devices---so I don't exactly regret getting you to clarify things. Could I suggest that a better tagline would be that AxKit is superior when creating easily (re-)targetable sites with mostly static content? It might stave off more ignorant comments. Mike. Matt, I've also found your use of static to describe transformable or re-targetable(unfortunate word) content to be confusing. This discussion helps clarify things, a little. ;-) Ed
Re: Fast DB access
Matthew Kennedy wrote: I'm on several postgresql mailing lists and couldn't find a recent post from you complaining about 6.5.3 performance problems (not even by an archive search). Your benchmark is worthless until you try postgresql 7.1. There have been two major releases of postgresql since 6.5.x (ie. 7.0 and 7.1) and several minor ones over a total of 2-3 years. It's no secret that they have tremendous performance improvements over 6.5.x. So why did you benchmark 6.5.x? This is a good comparison of MySQL and PostgreSQL 7.0: "Open Source Databases: As The Tables Turn" -- http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20001112.php3 We haven't tried this one. We are doing a project on mysql. Our preliminary assessment is, it's a shocker. They justify not having commit and rollback!! Makes us think whether they are even lower end than MS-Access. Again, checkout PostgreSQL 7.1 -- I believe "commit" and "rollback" (as you put it) are available. BTW, I would like to see that comment about MS-Access posted to pgsql-general... I dare ya. :P Matthew You can scale any of these databases; Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL, but please research each one thoroughly and tune it properly before you do your benchmarking. And, again, MySQL does support transactions now. Such chutzpah for them to have promoted an "atomic operations" paradigm for so long without supporting transactions! But that discussion is moot now. Please be advised that MySQL is threaded and must be tuned properly to handle many concurrent users on Linux. See the docs at http://www.mysql.com The author of the PHP Builder column did not do his research, so his results for MySQL on Linux are way off. Happily, though, even he got some decent results from PostgreSQL 7.0. The kernel of wisdom here: If you are going to use one of the Open Source databases, please use the latest stable release (they improve quickly!) and please either hire someone with some expertise installing and administering, and tuning your database of choice on your platform of choice or do the research thoroughly yourself. Ed
Re: Varaible scope memory under mod_perl
agh! check the headers! Steven Zhu wrote: How could I unsubscribe from [EMAIL PROTECTED] you so much.Steven. -Original Message-
Re: Not even beginning - INSTALL HELP
If you are going to upgrade gcc for RH 7.0, I reccomend the new source RPM for gcc to be found in the updates directory on any redhat mirror site. In fact, if you are sticking with RH you should see about updating a number of things. 23, Ed "G.W. Haywood" wrote: Hi there, On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, A. Santillan Iturres wrote: I have Apache 1.3.12 running on a RedHat 7.0 box with perl, v5.6.0 built for i386-linux I went to install mod_perl-1.25: When I did: perl Makefile.PL I've got a: Segmentation fault (core dumped) Did you build your Perl yourself? Sounds like there's a problem with it. Check out the mod_perl List archives for problems with gcc (the C compiler) that was shipped with RedHat 7.0. You should probably get that replaced to start with. (Or use Slackware - sorry:) 73, Ged.
Re: is morning bug still relevant?
Please use the MySQL modules list. Responses are timely. ;-) ed Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Vivek Khera wrote: "SV" == Steven Vetzal [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: SV Greetings, to say "ping doesn't work in all cases" without qualifiying why and/or which drivers that applies to. SV We've had to write our own -ping method for the MySQL DBD SV driver. Our developer tried to track down a maintainer for the SV DBD::msql/mysql module to submit a diff, but to no avail. How old a version are you talking about? In any case, according to CPAN, the DBD::mysql module is "owned" by Module id = DBD::mysql DESCRIPTION Mysql Driver for DBI CPAN_USERID JWIED (Jochen Wiedmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]) CPAN_VERSION 2.0414 CPAN_FILEJ/JW/JWIED/Msql-Mysql-modules-1.2215.tar.gz DSLI_STATUS RmcO (released,mailing-list,C,object-oriented) INST_FILE(not installed) and I *know* he's responsive to that email address at least as of a month or so ago, as we exchanged correspondence on another matter. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Vivek Khera, Ph.D.Khera Communications, Inc. Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rockville, MD +1-240-453-8497 AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera http://www.khera.org/~vivek/
[OT]Re: mod_perl advocacy project resurrection
Aristotle from the Ars Rhetorica on money: Money will not make you wise, but it will bring a wise man to your door. Robin Berjon wrote: At 12:39 06/12/2000 -0800, brian moseley wrote: ActiveState has built an Perl/Python IDE out of Mozilla: http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.html too bad it's windows only :/ That's bound to change. I think AS will release it on all platforms where Moz/Perl/Python run when it's finished. The current release is very unstable anyway. -- robin b. All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. -- Aristotle - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Apache::Registry() and strict
Ron, This is a greivous FAQ. Please read the guide at http://perl.apache.org/guide You'll find much more than this question answered. Ed Ron Rademaker wrote: Hello, I'm just starting with mod_perl and I'm using Apache::Registry(). The second line after #!/usr/bin/perl -w is use strict; But somehow variables I use in the script are still defined if I execute the script again, in one of the script I said undef $foo at the end, but I don't think this is the way it should be done, but it did work. Anyone knows what could be causing this?? Ron Rademaker PS. Please CC to me because I'm not subscribed to this mailinglist
Re: Apache trouble reading in large cookie contents
Explictly echoing Gunther, don't go there! Use cookies, think crumbs of info, as flyweights. Significant chunks of data need to be passed and stored in other ways. Ed Gunther Birznieks wrote: Caveat: even if you modify apache to do larger cookies, it's possible that there will be a set of browsers that won't support it. At 04:48 PM 10/20/00 -0700, ___cliff rayman___ wrote: i'm not an expert with this, but, a quick grep for your error in the apache source (mine is still 1.3.9 ) and some digging yield: ./include/httpd.h:#define DEFAULT_LIMIT_REQUEST_FIELDSIZE 8190 so you're right, 8K is currently the apache limit. if you try to change this value in the source code, you will probably also have to muck with IOBUFSIZE and possibly other things as well. IOBUFSIZE is 8192 and the DEFAULT_LIMIT_REQUEST_FIELDSIZE is set to 2 bytes below that to make room for the extra \r\n after the last header. looks like you'll have to take responsibility for mucking with the apache source, or sending smaller cookies and using some other techniques such as HIDDEN fields. -- ___cliff [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.genwax.com/ "Biggs, Jody" wrote: I'm having trouble when a browser sends a fair sized amount of data to Apache as cookies - say around 8k. Apache then complains (and fails the request) with a message of the sort: [date] [error] [client 1.2.3.4] request failed: error reading the headers I assume this is due to a compile time directive to Apache specifying the maximum size of a header line. __ Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) eXtropia - The Web Technology Company http://www.extropia.com/
Re: Forking in mod_perl?
Hi David, Check out the guide at http://perl.apache.org/guide/performance.html#Forking_and_Executing_Subprocess The Eagle book also covers the C API subprocess details on page 622-631. Let us know if the guide is unclear to you, so we can improve it. Ed "David E. Wheeler" wrote: Hi All, Quick question - can I fork off a process in mod_perl? I've got a piece of code that needs to do a lot of processing that's unrelated to what shows up in the browser. So I'd like to be able to fork the processing off and return data to the browser, letting the forked process handle the extra processing at its leisure. Is this doable? Is forking a good idea in a mod_perl environment? Might there be another way to do it? TIA for the help! David -- David E. Wheeler Software Engineer Salon Internet ICQ: 15726394 [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: dwTheory
Re: Forking in mod_perl?
I hope it is clear that you don't want fork the whole server! Mod_cgi goes to great pains to effectively fork a subprocess, and was the major impetus I believe for the development of the C subprocess API. It (the source code for mod_cgi) is a great place to learn some of the subtleties as the Eagle book points out. As the Eagle book says, Apache is a complex beast. Mod_perl gives you the power to use the beast to your best advantage. Now you are faced with a trade off. Is it more expensive to detach a subprocess, or use the child cleanup phase to do some extra processing? I'd have to know more specifics to answer that with any modicum of confidence. Cheers, Ed "David E. Wheeler" wrote: ed phillips wrote: Hi David, Check out the guide at http://perl.apache.org/guide/performance.html#Forking_and_Executing_Subprocess The Eagle book also covers the C API subprocess details on page 622-631. Let us know if the guide is unclear to you, so we can improve it. Yeah, it's a bit unclear. If I understand correctly, it's suggesting that I do a system() call and have the perl script called detach itself from Apache, yes? I'm not too sure I like this approach. I was hoping for something a little more integrated. And how much overhead are we talking about getting taken up by this approach? Using the cleanup phase, as Geoffey Young suggests, might be a bit nicer, but I'll have to look into how much time my processing will likely take, hogging up an apache fork while it finishes. Either way, I'll have to think about various ways to handle this stuff, since I'm writing it into a regular Perl module that will then be called from mod_perl... Thanks, David
Re: open(FH,'|qmail-inject') fails
Greg Stark wrote: A better plan for such systems is to have a queue in your database for parameters for e-mails to send. Insert a record in the database and let your web server continue processing. Have a separate process possibly on a separate machine or possibly on multiple machines do selects from that queue and deliver mail. I think the fastest way is over a single SMTP connection to the mail relay rather than forking a process to inject the mail. This keeps the very variable -- even on your own systems -- mail latency completely out of the critical path for web server requests. Which is really the key measure that dictates the requests/s you can serve. Exactly, Greg. This is homologous to proxy serving http requests. Ideally, the data/text should be relayed to a separate, dedicated mail server. This has come up repeatedly for me on performance tuning projects. If there are a number of mail processes negotiating with remote hosts even running on the same machine as you are web serving from, you may, under significant load, degrade performance.
Re: [OT] [JOB] mod_perl and Apache developers wanted
It is interesting and and somewhat ironic that the Engineering dep at eToys is part of the open source community and culture while their management's behavior was so disastrously misguided and so misunderstanding of net culture and precedent. They shot themselves in the foot pretty badly. Would eToys have paid for the legal expenses of the Etoy group if they weren't clued in by their Engineering department? Have they learned a hard lesson? Perrin is an exemplary figure, and I commiserate with him, but some basic precedents of net culture need to be respected for the network to function and the culture to flourish. If we had not protested the attempted eToys domain grab, and I was one who protested, they may have never recanted and Etoy might still be fighting at absurd personal cost. Cheers, Ed Paul Singh wrote: Regardless of what eToys' intentions were, the way I see it, this was a case in which a billion dollar corporation (well, at least it was back then) filed suit against a handful of artists who had the etoy.com domain way before eToys came along. eToys had no legitimate stake to the domain... and I don't associate legitimacy with the law... they seldom coincide. So if this isn't a case of the bigger guy bullying the little guy, what is it? Granted, I have a distant association with the eToy crew so my opinions will be biased... however, even with staying to the facts and ignoring eToys' motivations, their actions alone reek of unfairness (at best). Of course, this says little of what type of work environment eToys is and the people that work there... but it does comment on the corporation and the people running it. But as you said, this is definitely off-topic, and I will cease further comment... take care. - jps -Original Message- From: Perrin Harkins [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 4:48 PM To: Paul Singh Cc: ModPerl Mailing List Subject: RE: [OT] [JOB] mod_perl and Apache developers wanted On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Paul Singh wrote: While that may be true (as with many publications), I hope you're not denying the facts of this case The basic facts are correct: eToys received complaints from parents about the content their children found on the etoy.com site and, after failing to reach an agreement with the site's operators, filed a lawsuit involving trademarks which led to etoy being ordered to shut down their site by a judge. Slashdot's coverage ignored or underreported some aspects of the situation (the motivation behind the lawsuit, epxloitation of the name confusion on the part of etoy), and reported some conjecture and pure flights of fancy as fact (evil intentions, scheming lawyers). You have no idea how painful it is to read things like that from a source that you trust and consider part of your community. I guess I should have known better though: Slashdot is an op/ed site. If you want the news, you still have to read the New York Times (who had much more accurate coverage of the events). Anyway, I don't claim that eToys was right to take legal action, just that the reports about an evil empire were greatly exaggerated and that eToys is a good place to work, full of good people. Anyone who doesn't believe me at this point probably never will, so I'm going to stop spamming the list about this subject and go back to spamming about mod_perl. - Perrin
apache.org down
"Hughes, Ralph" wrote: COOL! I couldn't wait... I built and installed mod_perl 1.24 and it fixed the problem! Now if I can just get the CGI module to recognize my domainname .. :-) -Original Message- From: Hughes, Ralph Sent: Friday, June 02, 2000 2:02 PM To: Geoffrey Young; 'Michael Todd Glazier'; ModPerl Subject: RE: Segmetation Fault problem I'm not too good on back traces myself. ` I'm using a dynamic build of mod_perl, so I may try building the 1.24 version next week sometime. I hadn't thought of changing the PerFreshStart parameter, it might make a difference... -Original Message- From: Geoffrey Young [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 02, 2000 1:11 PM To: Hughes, Ralph; 'Michael Todd Glazier'; ModPerl Subject: RE: Segmetation Fault problem hmmm, did you try upgrading your installation then? you are using a static mod_perl? PerlFreshRestart Off? I'm no good at reading backtraces, but posting that is probably the next step (see SUPPORT doc section on core dumps in the distribution) sorry I can't be of more help... --Geoff
was apache.org down
Level 3 is broken. They know and are working on it. hmmm Ed
Re: was apache.org down
Replying to myself. It is back up, obviously. sorry for the noise Ed Phillips wrote: Level 3 is broken. They know and are working on it. hmmm Ed
Re: [benchmark] DBI/preload (was Re: [RFC] improving memory mappingthru code exercising)
Yes, very cool Stas! Perrin Harkins wrote: On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Stas Bekman wrote: correction for the 3rd version (had the wrong startup), but it's almost the same. Version Size SharedDiff Test type 1 3469312 2609152 860160 install_driver 2 3481600 2605056 876544 install_driver connect_on_init 3 3469312 2588672 880640 preload driver 4 3477504 2482176 995328 nothing added 5 3481600 2469888 1011712 connect_on_init Cool, thanks for running the test! I will put this information to good use...
Re: oracle : The lowdown
For those of you tired of this thread please excuse me, but here is MySQL's current position statement on and discussion about transactions: Disclaimer: I just helped Monty write this partly in response to some of the fruitful, to me, discussion on this list. I know this is not crucial to mod_perl but I find the "wise men who are enquirers into many things" to be one of the great things about this list, to paraphrase old Heraclitus. I learn quite a bit about quite many things by following leads and hints here as well as by seeing others problems. I'd love to see your criticism of the below either here or off the list. Ed - The question is often asked, by the curious and the critical, "Why is MySQl not a transactional database?" or "Why does MySQl not support transactions." MySQL has made a conscious decision to support another paradigm for data integrity, "atomic operations." It is our thinking and experience that atomic operations offer equal or even better integrity with much better performance. We, nonetheless, appreciate and understand the transactional database paradigm and plan, in the next few releases, on introducing transaction safe tables on a per table basis. We will be giving our users the possibility to decide if they need the speed of atomic operations or if they need to use transactional features in their applications. How does one use the features of MySQl to maintain rigorous integrity and how do these features compare with the transactional paradigm? First, in the transactional paradigm, if your applications are written in a way that is dependent on the calling of "rollback" instead of "commit" in critical situations, then transactions are more convenient. Moreover, transactions ensure that unfinished updates or corrupting activities are not commited to the database; the server is given the opportunity to do an automatic rollback and your database is saved. MySQL, in almost all cases, allows you to solve for potential problems by including simple checks before updates and by running simple scripts that check the databases for inconsistencies and automatically repair or warn if such occurs. Note that just by using the MySQL log or even adding one extra log, one can normally fix tables perfectly with no data integrity loss. Moreover, "fatal" transactional updates can be rewritten to be atomic. In fact,we will go so far as to say that all integrity problems that transactions solve can be done with LOCK TABLES or atomic updates, ensuring that you never will get an automatic abort from the database, which is a common problem with transactional databases. Not even transactions can prevent all loss if the server goes down. In such cases even a transactional system can lose data. The difference between different systems lies in just how small the time-lap is where they could lose data. No system is 100 % secure, only "secure enough". Even Oracle, reputed to be the safest of transactional databases, is reported to sometimes lose data in such situations. To be safe with MySQL you only need to have backups and have the update logging turned on. With this you can recover from any situation that you could with any transactional database. It is, of course, always good to have backups, independent of which database you use. The transactional paradigm has its benefits and its drawbacks. Many users and application developers depend on the ease with which they can code around problems where an "abort" appears or is necessary, and they may have to do a little more work with MySQL to either think differently or write more. If you are new to the atomic operations paradigm, or more familiar or more comfortable with transactions, do not jump to the conclusion that MySQL has not addressed these issues. Reliability and integrity are foremost in our minds. Recent estimates are that there are more than 1,000,000 mysqld servers currently running, many of which are in production environments. We hear very, very seldom from our users that they have lost any data, and in almost all of those cases user error is involved. This is in our opinion the best proof of MySQL's stability and reliability. Lastly, in situations where integrity is of highest importance, MySQL's current features allow for transaction-level or better reliability and integrity. If you lock tables with LOCK TABLES, all updates will stall until any integrity checks are made. If you only do a read lock (as opposed to a write lock), then reads and inserts are still allowed to happen. The new inserted records will not be seen by any of the clients that have a READ lock until they relaease their read locks. With INSERT DELAYED you can queue insert into a local queue, until the locks are released, without having to have the client to wait for the insert to complete. Atomic in the sense that we mean it is nothing magical, it only means that you can be sure that while each specific
Re: modperl success story
The troll vanisheth! ha! Reminds me of the Zen story of an old fisherman in a boat on a lake in a heavy can't see your hands fog. He bumps into another boat, and shouts at the other guy, "Look where you're going would you! You almost knocked me over." He pulls up beside the boat and is about to give the other guy a piece of his mind, but when he looks in the other boat, he discovers that no one else is there. Flame trolls on mailing lists are virtual empty boats, whose only value is the sometimes humorous apoplexy elicited in the old sea salts on the list. Ed
Re: APACHE_ROOT
Ged, You are very entertaining. The code in question is also known as a combined copy and substitution. Beware if you haven't got /src on the end of your source directory! If you don't have a match with the string or regexp , you'll just get a straight copy. Ed X-Authentication-Warning: C2H5OH.jubileegroup.co.uk: ged owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 00:00:37 + (GMT) From: "G.W. Haywood" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Hi there, On 14 Jan 2000, William P. McGonigle wrote: Can someone explain what APACHE_ROOT is meant to be? I'm assuming it's somehow different thatn APACHE_SRC (which I'm defining). The expression ($APACHE_ROOT = $APACHE_SRC) =~ s,/src/?$,,; sets the scalar $APACHE_ROOT to be equal to the scalar $APACHE_SRC and then chops off any "/src" or "/src/" from the end of it. The =~ binding operator (p27) tells perl to do the substitution s,/src/?$,, to the thing on left hand side of its expression. The parentheses (p77) mean the thing in them is a term, which has the highest precedence in perl so the assignment has to be done first. The substitution then has to be done on the result, $APACHE_ROOT and not $APACHE_SRC, er, obviously. The three commas are quotes (p41) for a substitution, presumably chosen because they can't easily appear in a filename. The pattern to match is /src/?$ The question mark is a quantifier (p63), it says we can have 0 or 1 trailing slash in the pattern we match - it's trailing at the end of a string because of the $ (p62). If our string matches, the matching bit is replaced with the bit between the second and third commas. There's nothing between the second and third commas, so it's replaced with nothing. Have a look at pages 72 to 74 especially for more about the s/// construct. The page numbers are from the Camel Book, second edition. I keep it on my desk at all times, it stops my papers blowing around. You will help yourself a lot with these things if you read chapters one and two five or six times this year as a kind of a penance. So if $APACHE_SRC eq "/usr/local/apache/src/" or $APACHE_SRC eq "/usr/local/apache/src" then $APACHE_ROOT eq "/usr/local/apache" after the substitution. I just *love* Perl's pattern matching! 73, Ged.
Re: mysql.pm on Apache/mod_perl/perl win98
Hi Dave, I only do *nix, but I think that you should not need mysql.pm if you are using DBI/DBD. Jochen is quite helpful on the MySQL modules list. subscription info availble at www.mysql.com. Good Luck, Ed
Re: Comparing arrays
Really Dheeraj,
This is not a mod_perl specific question, and I don't know the all important context
into which this boilerplate code you are seeking to elicit from the list is to be
dropped.
here is a boilerplate "find me keys that are not in both hashes":
foreach (keys %hash_one) {
push(@here_not_there, $_) unless exists $hash_two{$_};
}
shame on you. To expiate your sins, read perldoc pages for two hours
everyday for two weeks.
ed
Re: Comparing arrays
Cliff, I wanted him to work for the rest of it, or at least go to another list. It looks like he wanted two arrays, @in_hash_one_alone and @in_hash_two_alone, so having him push to one array may confuse him. he's better off doing a little studying, methinks. ed
Re: DBI
This is also not a mod_perl question. depending on where your DBD::Oracle is installed you can get away with certain liberties in the Oracle library department. Nonetheless, you should continue your inquiry on a DBI related list. Thank you, Ed
Re: Server Stats
this is like closing the gate after the horse has bolted without things like decent locking and transactions. Although perhaps I'm mistaken and You can rest assured that they know what they are doing. :-) It is also worth upgrading to newer versions. The newest versions not deemed stable just yet no longer use ISAM, are much faster, and will allow for a host of new features. stay tuned. ed
Re: Spreading the load across multiple servers (was: Server Stats)
I don't have any real answers - just a suggestion. What is wrong with the classic RDBMS architecture of RAID 1 on multiple drives with MySQL - surely it will be able to do that transparently? Yes, RAID is very helpful with MySQL. I spoke with Monty, the developer of MySQL at the open source conference in Monterey and he said that they are currently working on replication and mirroring features. It might be worth inquiring directly with them. Ed
