/sigh
I’m fed up with Dreamhost’s performance. Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely sure it’s Dreamhost’s fault. Part of it could be the god-awful slow Javascript parsing of Firefox. It doesn’t help that Firefox takes 450MB of memory for 56 tabs (yes, it’s a tad ridiculous, I realize that), when Opera takes 170MB for the same. I haven’t really touched Opera in a while, since I’m too attached to Greasemonkey, Firefox’s Javascript console, and the DOM inspector. Opera seems to have have reasonable alternatives for those now (other than Greasemonkey). My one gripe at this point is Opera’s tab handling, which was a plus before. I’m finding myself preferring Firefox’s “endlessly scroll through your tabs” option (or the dropdown), just because I can see what they’re titled, and easily check whether or not I have new GMail.
I suppose now that GMail supports IMAP, I should just set up Opera to poll that, and the windows widget is pretty good, when it comes to it. At least it doesn’t slow to a crawl when Slashdot loads an animated ad (I refuse to use AdBlock for sites I actually like. Slashdot’s whitelisted, and I find myself occasionally clicking their ads). The RSS feeder wipes the floor with Firefox, it doesn’t peg the CPU when I open it up (along with however many tabs I left last time I closed it), it remembers page and window positioning between instances. I kind of wonder why I ever switched.
It doesn’t help that the clueless dipshit who wrote one of our monitoring applications has no idea how threading is supposed to work. A program with a 20MB footprint should not soak 50% of a 3Ghz Xeon every 4-5 seconds while it polls. I haven’t looked at the source, so I have no idea what’s happening there, but it can’t be right. One of my Perl scripts (which totals HTTP hits) chews through 4GB of logs every day in about 6 seconds, at 30% CPU. I find it hard to believe that a non-forked Perl script is somehow more optimized than the C# threading library. It also doesn’t help that Outlook takes an extraordinary amount of memory to do anything, nor that Windows aggressively swaps programs you haven’t used in a little while. That’s nice, except that I have, at any given time, 9-15 programs open. Putty’s fine to swap. Outlook, WINWORD (which Outlook still calls for composing messages, even plaintext), IE, Citrix, and the like are not. A 10 second delay when I click on Outlook again? Nuts to that. If I could convince our Exchange admin to turn on IMAP/POP, I’d just move to Linux. MAPI sucks, and I’ve never gotten Evolution’s Outlook Web Access plugin to work properly.
VMware is a possible solution, but it’s ridiculous to virtualize Windows just so I can run Outlook. Similarly, I’d like to get our AD admin to enable LDAP spanning so I can get our *nix systems on the domain and stop replicating the forest to an internal LDAP server just to keep accounts synced.
As it turns out, it’s not just a problem at work. Dreamhost’s response times are pitiful from home, too. Nine seconds to respond to a HTTP request? Pass. I’m seriously considering migrating to Joyent’s OpenSolaris hosting, even though it may cost more. However, they only let you run one Mongrel (the server Rails works best with) instance. That’s fine, and Rails should respond in virtually no time. However, I need to more closely research Apache reverse proxying. I could move to Typo, Mephisto, Radiant, or some other system for blogging, but one Mongrel instance isn’t going to cut it if I’m running a few Rails apps, and Mongrel doesn’t handle PHP. Maybe FastCGI performance is better at Joyent. I don’t know. Just that I can’t handle this pitiful performance anymore.
I’ll likely see what sustained performance is like on the Intellistation (which will be a web server) via a redirected subdomain monitoring a SNMP daemon (realtime CPU/network graphing). I know my home connection holds up really well via FreeNX, but it remains to be seen whether or not Comcast decides to block port 80 if they see a lot of traffic.
As a total aside, I feel like it should be “an HTTP request” and “an SNMP” daemon, though all proper rules of English say it should be “a HTTP request” or “a SMTP” daemon. IETF (SNMP) and w3 (HTTP) both have websites which agree with the usage of “an” (via a Google search for “an SNMP” vis-a-vis “a SNMP” and likewise for HTTP), but I’ve yet to find definitive rules for usage with regard to acronyms. Instinct tells me it should only be used when it’s referring to a singular adjective phrase versus a predicate or plural, but I can’t establish why. Any thoughts, grammar Nazi?
Also, I highly recommend A Fine Frenzy’s CD.
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By Missy, November 1, 2007 @ 12:09 pm
I would say “an HTTP” or “an SMTP” — English grammar rules dictate that when the first letter is silent (leaving you to start with a vowel sound) you say an.. such as “an herb”. I can’t think of a comparable word starting with S, but there are several starting with H and I know you use “an” for those. It seems logical to me that HTTP and SMTP would follow suit.
By Ryan, November 1, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
My only real though is that singular letters are pronounced differently phonetically (es rather than s with the bar over it), but still not sure if it’s proper or not.
By Dan, November 1, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
I concur that it should be “an HTTP”.and “an SNMP”. Here you go, straight from Oxford.
According to The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, “The indefinite article a is used before words beginning with a consonant sound, including /y/ and /w/ sounds. The other form, an, is used before words beginning with a vowel sound. Hence, a European country, a Ouija board, a uniform, an FBI agent, an MBA degree, an SEC filing. Writers on usage formerly disputed whether the correct article is a or an with historian, historic, and a few other words. The traditional rule is that if the h- is sounded, a is the proper form. Most people following that rule would say a historian and a historic–e.g.:’Democrat Bill Clinton appears within reach of capturing the White House in Tuesday’s election, but Republicans hope that late momentum, can enable President Bush to win a historic upset’ (Dallas Morning News). Even H.W. Fowler, in the England of 1926, advocated a before historic(al) and humble (MEU1).
The theory behind using an in such a context, however, is that the h- is very weak when the accent is on the second rather than the first syllable (giving rise, by analogy, to an habitual offender, an humanitarian, an hallucinatory image, and an harassed schoolteacher). Thus no authority countenances an history[emphasis added], though a few older ones prefer an historian and an historical.
Today, however, an hypothesis and an historical are likely to strike readers and listeners as affectations. As Mark Twain once wrote, referring to humble, heroic, and historical: ‘Correct writers of the American language do not put an before those words’ (The Stolen White Elephant,1882). Anyone who sounds the h- in such words should avoid pretense and use a (Garner 1).
Now… all you have to do is find a table (most seem to be images) with international phonetic spellings for each individual letter in the alphabet when spoken individually, and note which begin with vowel sounds. Note that acronyms commonly spoken as words (SCUBA, RAM, etc) follow the same indefinite article rules as normal words even though they’re acronyms. Easy!
By Dan, November 1, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
What the fuck. Your Wordpress doesn’t allow me to put spaces?
Do the break tags work?
By Dan, November 1, 2007 @ 7:11 pm
How about this way?
By Dan, November 1, 2007 @ 7:12 pm
Grr. Please
ditchreplaceupgrade your Wordpress, or edit your CSS comments code.By Ryan, November 1, 2007 @ 7:45 pm
I mentioned that on Missy’s blog today. I’ll be fixing it tomorrow.