I tend to be someone who is more pragmatic about using the right tool for the job rather than being language agnostic, so I found this overview on C++ vs Java vs Python vs Ruby (via Jake) to be an interesting comparison. However both Rod and I agree that the typical “Java is slower than C++” argument to mostly be a fallacy.
Michal J. Radwin of Yahoo! gave a presentation at the recent ApacheCon 2005 about their own internal version of Apache HTTPD Server called yapache, and the various hacks and configuration issues which they’ve worked through over the years.
Since 1996, Yahoo has been running Apache HTTP Server on thousands of servers and serving billions of requests a day. This session reveals the secrets of how Yahoo gets maximum performance out of minimal hardware by tweaking configuration directives and hacking the source code. Radwin will cover topics such as reducing bandwidth costs, extensible logfile format and rotation schemes, dumping core gracefully, and how to avoid the dreaded MaxClients, Max/MinSpareServers, StartServers configuration nightmare.
Being that I work pretty frequently with threading (at least at a high level), I think one of my favorite points of the presentation is when he mentions the difficulty of thread programming, though it’s certainly not the point of the presentation. Overall it’s a very good and valuable presentation if you use Apache HTTPD Server.
I was just browsing around SourceForge and noticed that they will be launching Subversion support sometime in Feburary if beta testing goes well. After working with Subversion for almost a year now, it’s good to see how popular it’s getting, not to mention finally having the opportunity to use it for free at SourceForge soon.
On a related note, I’ve had the opportunity to use a very large deployment of SourceForge Enterprise recently (my employer is listed as one of the customers) and it’s very cool stuff.
If you would like a very, very scaled down version of SourceForge for Subversion, you should check out Trac. In particular, the Wiki and Timeline features are very cool, while I don’t necessarily like the ticketing or release tracking.
Some applications require direct access to the Windows Console to install (in my case, PostgreSQL), and as such it would seem that you have to be at the actual server to install them. Luckily there was a handy trick to get around this listed in the PostgreSQL windows installer docs. Simply start Remote Deskop via command line like so:
mstsc /console
This attaches Remote Desktop / Terminal Services directly to the system console, thereby allowing you to install applications which require the system console rather than a remote session.
