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Monday, July 14, 2008

httperf and libevent and the future of everything

Firstly, congratulations to Adrian Chadd for starting the httperf port to libevent. Already we have seen some massive performance enhancements. CPU usage on my opensuse 11.0 workstation has improved about %3000 percent.

Certainly there is some stability work to be done. I am currently getting segmentation faults with very high request loads.

The current implementation does not use a persistent event loop, which means that the other useful features that libevent provides are not available (timers for example).

Something I want to see developed going forward is an asynchronous http client library around. The http work already done with libevent is certainly a start to this, but is far from complete. Essentially, what I want is a client api where I can perform some http client action asynchronously without needing to deal with any messy details.

The intention here is to foster a deal of code-reuse between http implementation projects that all use libevent at the core. After that, portability sits firmly on libevent's shoulders (where it belongs).

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Open source home renovations

On June 30, 2008 I took possession of my very first property. It's an 800 square foot, two-bedroom condo in South Calgary (Alberta).

Given that I am a massive geek, part of the renovations I am taking on in preparation for moving in, is a robust home network. This includes (at least) seven cat5e, and six rg6 cable drops. For this I have used a fancy product by Leviton. Their Structured Media center items appear to be exactly what I need to marshal my assorted cables, and send them along to their eventual end points.

This allows a lot of flexibility towards future home renovations, and lets you easily re-design the layout of the network at a future point in time. As far as I am concerned, this sort of cable organization is the best way to go.

In any case, all this work is being completed with the intention of designing an ideal open source home. My routing, media distribution, work bench, telephony and data storage system have all marshaled into a single room. The original analog telephony network is untouched in case a future owner doesn't want to use the fancy system that I have built.

Anyways, I have been doing this upgrade as part of a behind the scenes project that I have been playing with to develop a home running entirely on open source software. More on this later, expect interesting developments as the year goes on.

-Ted