Posted by mark.
Results > Posts Filed Under > Technology
Jul
6
Posted by mark.
Bandwidth providers: Please follow Google’s lead in helping startups, the environment and yourselves
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There’s a post on Hacker News today pointing to a few open source javascript libraries that Google is hosting on their content distribution network. ScriptSrc.net has a great UI that gives you an easy way to link to the libs from your web pages. Developers and companies can link to these scripts from their own websites and gain the following benefits:
Your visitor may have already cached the script on another website so your page will load faster
The script is hosted …
May
3
Posted by mark.
Facebook has over 400 million active users and members spend over 951 man-years on the site each month. Facebook is passing Google this year as the most visited site in the US and is going to earn somewhere between $710M and $1.1B in revenue this year.
Google on the other hand have a $27B revenue run rate for 2010 [based on Q1 2010 earnings]. With similar on-site traffic they are doing 25 times Facebook’s revenue. Google have had a long time to …
Mar
4
Posted by mark.
This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks.
If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if you already have a great web server. Put it in front and get it to act as a reverse proxy.
First grab this perl script which you …
Dec
1
Posted by mark.
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget:
The first thing you’ll do is get a Linode server because they have the fastest CPU and disk.
Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl …
Oct
27
Posted by mark.
Disclaimer: You may brick your fancy new Linksys router by following the advice in this blog entry. A large number of folks have installed this software successfully including me. But consider yourself warned in case you’re the unlucky one.
I use SSH a lot. My wife and nephew love streaming video like Hulu instead of regular cable. For the last few years there’s been a cold war simmering. I’m working late, they start streaming, and my SSH session to my server …
Oct
25
Posted by mark.
Ian Hickson’s latest draft of the Web Sockets Protocol (WSP) is up for your reading pleasure. It got me thinking about the tangible benefits the protocol is going to offer over the long polling that my company and others have been using for our real-time products.
The protocol works as follows:
Your browser accesses a web page and loads, lets say, a javascript application. Then the javascript application decides it needs a constant flow of data to and from it’s web server. …
Oct
20
Posted by mark.
Well the title says it all. Internet routers live at Layer 3 [the Network Layer] of the OSI model which I’ve included to the left. HTTP and HTTPS live at Layer 7 (Application layer) of the OSI model, although some may argue HTTPS lives at Layer 6.
So how is it that Layer 3 devices like routers treat HTTPS traffic differently?
Because HTTPS servers set the DF or Do Not Fragment IP flag on packets and regular HTTP servers do not.
This matters …
Nov
12
Posted by mark.
This is another thing I just couldn’t find no matter how hard I googled. Here’s the story behind this post. Scroll down if you want to get at the useful stuff.
I run a cluster of Dell 2950’s and I just ordered second CPU’s (Intel XEON E5410 64 bit) for all the machines. I test upgraded one of them and the LCD on the front came up orange with an error message and the chassis cooling fan cranked all the way …
Mar
26
Posted by mark.
A lame video on techcrunch today inspired me to go hunting for the original argument between Linus Torvalds and (Professor) Andy Tanenbaum and here it is. Titled Linux is Obsolete, it’s a post by the author of Minix in 1992 telling Linus he’s just created an obsolete OS that’s running on obsolete hardware (the 386) that won’t be around in a few years.
Andy’s ideas are a great example of how an academic approach to software design can lead to layers …
Mar
24
Posted by mark.
[Thanks Sam for the idea for this entry] Ever heard of IP Anycasting? Thanks to my recent change from godaddy (frowny face and no link) to dnsmadeeasy (happy face and they get a link) I’m now using a DNS provider that provides anycasting. What is it and should you care?
IP Anycasting is assigning the same IP address to multiple instances of the same service on strategic points in the network. For example, if you are a DNS provider, you might …