ZD's random thoughts

I have been using nginx and mongrel for my rails application on my 256 slice. It has been nice, except administration is becoming a big overhead when considering all the stuff I had to deal with fastcgi scripts for my other PHP applications/domains. 

I liked nginx because of its small footprint, and high performance. However when the administrative cost is getting higher, I start to look for alternatives.

Passenger is nice because of its low administrative overhead. But it does not come cheap – it is a module for apache, meaning I will need to run Apache as my web server. Considering the fact the slice has only 256M memory, it is a hard decision to get rid of nginx and bring back Apache.

Things I had to work on is the MPM portion of Apache configuration. My stock Apache from CentOS uses prefork MPM as the default MPM. When using the default configuration, Apache started too many spare servers which uses substantial amount of memory. As a result, the system was put into swap whenever there is a HTTP request. After lowering MaxSpareServers to 6, Apache and Passenger are doing fine. Swap is never used again and the applications are more responsive. 

Now I am happy.

Google Chrome 2.0 has been in the developer channel for a couple of days, with some interesting updates. Today I downloaded 2.0.156.1 and gave it a shot.

Everything seems to be fine, except Space bar no longer scrolls the page. Finally I found some relevant information here. Apparently they are going to fix it in the next dev channel release. That will be nice…

Today Amazon Web Service released their management console. Although Amazon is kind of late in its own game, this management console is nice for those who have been wanting a console from Amazon directly.

Running Amazon AWS is an interesting task. However using the web service interface alone is not fun at all, especially when you need to manage a great number of instances. Other companies such as RightScale have come up with the idea of providing a nice web GUI to improve the user experience. It is clear some customers from those company will move back to Amazon management console because of its pricing (free) and direct relationship with Amazon.

One of the news for today is Windows 7. The beta version was released to MSDN. People in the business IT world have been arguing whether they should skip Vista and upgrade directly from Windows XP.

Nevertheless, I jumped the boat. DVD ISO download from MSDN subscription is close to 3G, a little bit smaller than Windows Vista . The Guinea pig is my Dell Latitude E6400.

The upgrade process is rather painless. After popping the DVD into the Latitude, I was prompted about a couple of different options – update or clean install. As planned, I chose to upgrade from Vista. It took about 30 minutes to complete the whole process.

The startup screen is a little bit fancier than Vista’s. Performance wise, I feel it is getting better (very subjective though). I like the new taskbar, which feels like Mac OS X. You can “pin” an application and its instances on the taskbar, which eliminated the need for lauch bar from Vista/XP. However, I was disappointed at the desktop composition feature (the new name for Aero). When I enabled it, my screen display literally went corrupted. I am not sure whether it is with my video card (Intel GMA 4500) or not.  Other than that, everything seems to be fine.

What’s your experience?