from __future__ import *

While I didn't personally attend Freedel 06, I recently came across the slides for Anant Narayanan's Web Application Development talk. Specifically it covers JavaScript web application development with MochiKit and Dojo, and it's split into four sets of slides. I've just had a chance to give them a look and they're quite good.

The slides are all done with S5, which is what I used for the MochiKit Intro talk I gave a few months ago.

Part 1 - JavaScript:

A general overview of JavaScript and AJAX

Part 2 - MochiKit:

An overview of what MochiKit is and why you'd want to use it. Lots of pointers to cool features such as DOM and Signal.

Part 3 - Dojo:

Covers a bunch of the great functionality that Dojo has that isn't available anywhere else such as widgets, layout, animation, and offline storage.

Part 4 - Case Studies:

A few very short case studies of some JavaScript web applications.

I was benchmarking egeoip today, which is my from-scratch Erlang geolocation library. It uses the MaxMind GeoLite City database, which has implementations in a bunch of other languages so it's great to compare with. The results were rather surprising to me, because I hadn't previously done any benchmarking of Erlang performance.

The test environment is a MacBook Pro 2ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.7, Erlang R11B-1 w/ HiPE enabled, Python 2.4.3 (using their GeoIP Python API, which is written in C). I do have other processes running (namely iTunes), but the benchmark is fair because the background load is consistent throughout the tests.

Erlang, BEAM:

~13k geolocations/sec

Python/C:

~18k geolocations/sec

Erlang, HiPE:

~44k geolocations/sec

As you can see, Erlang holds it own against Python w/ C extensions, and it can mop the floor with it when using the HiPE compiler. Erlang clearly kicks some serious ass at working with binaries, both in syntax and performance. The only work I had to do to make it faster was c(egeoip, [native]).

Note that I've only been using Erlang for a few weeks and have not done any profiling or performance tuning at all beyond what I assumed would be the fastest way given the documentation I had read.

Since the svnsync tool in Subversion 1.4 still lacks documentation, here's a quick example to get you started with it:

$ svnadmin create svn.mochikit.com
$ echo '#!/bin/sh' > svn.mochikit.com/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ chmod +x svn.mochikit.com/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ svnsync init file://$PWD/svn.mochikit.com http://svn.mochikit.com/
$ svnsync sync file://$PWD/svn.mochikit.com

The example performs the following tasks:

• Creates a new local repository named svn.mochikit.com
• Adds a trivial pre-revprop-change hook to the repository (required for svnsync)
• Initializes the svn.mochikit.com repository to be a mirror of http://svn.mochikit.com/
• Synchronizes the svn.mochikit.com repository with its initialized source

Note that this is point-in-time synchronization. To keep an up to date mirror you'll have to run svnsync sync on a regular basis (e.g. by cron job or post-commit hook).

If you're looking for an especially easy to install set of svn binaries for Mac OS X, I recommend Martin Ott's (of SubEthaEdit fame) build. I've been using it on all of my Macs for quite some time with no issues. Much less hassle than building it myself or using MacPorts (previously known as DarwinPorts).

A few weeks ago in Reverse Proxy Roundup I was evaluating reverse HTTP proxy solutions. At the time I had settled on Pound, but frankly it wasn't good enough for the load I expected it to handle. Additionally, spawning so many threads used far more RAM and CPU than it should've.

Not long after I wrote that post, a friend of mine pointed me at nginx. nginx is an extremely high performance HTTP server that offers reverse proxying, FastCGI, SSL, and even IMAP/POP3 proxying.

I have had precisely zero problems with nginx so far after about 5 weeks and hundreds of millions of proxied requests. Forget about lighttpd, nginx uses less memory, doesn't leak, and has higher performance (in my FreeBSD configuration, anyway).

The reason I didn't blog about it sooner is that the project is Russian and so was a large majority of its documentation at the time. With the 0.4 release, there's a much more complete draft of the English documentation available. Check it out; your high traffic servers will thank you for it.