Focus on Code

Last year i’ve gave one of my sites to people who really enjoys from opening undesirable sites on multi-user blogging sites. The site was a Wordpress MU site.

After that day they opened about 5K blogs on that site. 5K site means about 55K tables and 165K files on a single mySQL database. Till last month the site worked fine but after that some problems started to occur.

The main problem was sleeping zombie mysql threads created by wordpress mu. They could not be closed until they reach default wait_timeout (which is about 28800 secs.). So after about 20 process or according to server load mySQL starts to not respond requests and reaches maksimum connection limit.

I searched a lot but could not find out a solution. Here are some explanations to improve performance on high volume wordpress mu sites but those solutions won’t help me much. Was trying to decrease wait_timeout to 30 secs won’t help so much too cause whenever server load reaches high values according to high volume of created threads this timeout value could not help you.

So what i did? I simply closed that site. That’s why that site is not important for me, i’m just making a stress test on Wordpress and Wordpress Mu.

But if you’re planning to use Wordpress MU and you are considering that your site will reach thousands of blogs i will not suggest you to use Wordpress MU. This is experimental ofcourse but i’m sure that it’ll end soon with a failure.

Youtube was banned by Turk Telecom ( TTnet ) for some months according to a law court decision. Starting from last two days everyone can able to access Youtube without following a path (including DNS management or Using Proxies, etc.) other than pointing web browser to youtube.com.

But in that time Alexa Top 100 country listing have a some changes. For example there are two new proxy sites in that list. One is VTunnel at ranking 40 the second is Ktunnel at ranking 35. Youtube is 15th now. ( It was 4th to 6th )

Ktunnel and VTunnel (we can say these sites A to Z tunnel or simply in regex [a-z]tunnel) must thank Turk Telekom and the law court. And of course Turkish Video Sharing communities must also thank them too. ( There has been a conspiracy theory including that some of turkish video sharing sites are opening those trials for to increase their visitors. This may true or not. If it is true than we can say some turkish video sharing site owners has found a way to be against globalism and capitalism )

Whatever… Today i can be able to login to my youtube account and saw that lots of many people has sended me lots of many videos to watch! And i saw that Youtube has made some user interface changes.

Welcome (again) to Turkey Youtube!

There are so many (how many?) regular expressions control tool. I always prefer to use TRegexpr. It is very simple and a little buggy. It was written in Delphi using TRegexpr component which was developed by same person.

If you are a delphi programmer you must also check TRegexpr component. It has simple methods and really easy to use. You already know that Delphi has no built-in regexp engine. If you are like me that you cannot be able to write programs without regexp or have no time to write 15 lines of code where you can make it with 3 lines this component is for you.

You can download both component and control tool from developer’s site

( TRegexpr control tool focusoncode.com mirror - 182 KB)

Last ten days was very funny for me. I was collecting some information for my professional needs for a long time. 10 days ago i didn’t know how but i started to go inside C# and dotnet. In my entire life i was an open source guy (except my experiences in Delphi) and i was never interested in Microsoft Technologies. This is the first time i fall into Microsoft.

A programmer is always a programmer. When i started to work on C# i follow the classical path : First i checked the syntax second i looked into language for anything that i need to really know. I found out a C# Tutorial which fits my most needs.

Then i started to read a book about C# with a name Programming C# from O’Reilly Press. The writer of the book is Jesse Liberty. Later i found out Jesse Liberty is a well-known guru in most Microsoft Technologies. So i bet that i made a good choise. The book is very good, well-planed. It’s language is very simple (for those who is native language is not English). I can freely suggest this book to people who have a little experience in programming languages. If you have worked several years in programming the book is also good for you. But i think it’s not good for beginners. May be beginners may choose Microsoft Press’ Step by Step books.

C# is a good language i think. Some differences from Java/C++, same syntax as them, a good hierarchy. Visual Studio is also a good IDE as good as Delphi.

But in these time i cannot be able to stop to ask myself what am i doing? May be i’m still wearing my revolutionist-militarist ideas. Who knows?

Last year while i was the administrator of a one of popular turkish it community we’ve made a programming contest which was cancelled for a reason of no contestants. The subject of contest was to make a blogging program including two parts. First part was the client side part which contestants need to made a blog administration interface. Second part was the web part which contestants need to made a web interface.

The idea of this subject was this : Making administration panels is a so hard process. So why don’t we make administration section with a more object oriented language like Delphi?

While contest some people made critics including that we were wanting a program which we were planning to sell it!

This critics made me sick. Then i wrote a program similar to contest. I wrote a “Delphi Component Index” site which can be still accessable via www.componentbeacon.com

I made web site with PHP and client side with Delphi. Site uses mySQL.

Lets go in detail.

Read the rest of this entry »

How nice! Godaddy is requesting from you 150$ if your harddisk has a wrong boot sector or something like that! They just do remove your old disk, mount new disk and mount your old disk as secondary where this process is cost free in all dedicated companies (that i ever use).

But response time is great. It took one day to finish the job (after you pay 150 bucks)

Yeah it’s much for a harddisk removal but it’s worth if you ever waited 15 days for it!

And of course i’m agree with you about the idea : “Hosting companies has found a new generation of squeezing money from its customers! That’s owned boot sector or hacked partition table!“

mySQL is a performance devil if you’re using it on your localhost or LAN. But using it on internet as a remote storage server is not mean the performance you got will performance you got in your localhost or LAN.

If you want me to sample it with an absolute ratio i can clearly say that if you’re getting 100% performance in your localhost or LAN you’ll get 15% performance while you’re connecting remote mySQL server over tcp/ip.

There is a one configuration that you can increase performance about 5 to 15 percent. That’s to disable name resolving on mySQL. You can do this by adding a line in your mySQL config (my.cnf or my.ini) after [mysqld] line (if you’re using mysqld standart daemon) : skip-name-resolve

You can test it if you want. This will make move your remote connection performance from 15% to 20 to 30%.

But infact this performance increasement will not fit your needs. It’s still so slow for me to use it. Thus please think twice if you’re willing to use mySQL as a remote database server for your client applications. ( Yeah but still it rocks on localhost or LAN )

You can check how mySQL uses DNS resolve from this document. ( Document mirror on focus on code (16KB) )

If you’re deep inside computer related world you have to learn one of the virtues in this world. That’s patience. Your must be keep patience everytime, every day, every hour. Because you need that. In a complex senario everything goes wrong in a second. One second before you’re all right with any kind of job but after a second everything starts to come on you.

Last 4 years i’ve managed, administrated or used hostings or dedicated hostings from many company around the world. If one is from USA the other is from Germany. I tested about more than 7 hosting companies at least.

One month ago we’ve moved our sites to a new company. Infact we do not have any idea about that we’re moving our sites to worst hosting company ever. Before move i’ve checked internet for user comments about leaseweb. Most of the comments are around the support saying that worst support ever you can find. But i did not mind that comments cause success stories are not told most but failures are always spoken.

And i did a mistake!

After one month of working with Leaseweb we’ve encountered a problem. We tried to restart server but could’t. Tried to power-cycle server but we couldn’t.

Then asked leaseweb’s worst suppor ever to examine the problem.

I waited 2 days for them to make them send me a response. They said our harddisk has a problem. Needs to change with another harddisk.

We said O.K. do it.

They done it after 6 days!. For 6 days we’re closed. We could not reach any of sites. We could not reach server through SSH. The hosted firms that we’ve could not reach their emails. So nobody could do their daily works for six days!

The nightmare is not just like simple that i’ve told.

After 6 days they’ve send us an email including SSH, Panel details. But they were fully wrong. Then restarted to send emails. They’ve respond us after 1 day saying sorry for wrong details, here your true details!

Can a harddisk may burn. We can look this process as a simple process cause we’ve learned the one virtue called patience a long time ago.

But nobody can explain that to change a disk, image it, mount old disk in 7 days! That’s all totally one hour process.

But it took 7 days if you’re working with a poor hosting company that has poor customer support. Infact we can say there are no support. There are so many people saying “hey, i inform one my colleague for your process. Keep on” but you never have a chance to find a colleague that solve your problem.

For your information i neve suggest Leaseweb for any of you including my enemies!

Two month ago i bought out a Western Digital My Book World Edition II to save my downloads and keep my archives in a single media to quick access. My version of My Book is created for LAN usage. It has no USB connection directly to PC ( It has a USB port but it’s for data storage ). So you have to transfer files from LAN using your ethernet cable.

The problem starts here.

I’m using a 100Mbit LAN at my home. My switch is a 100Mbit switch. My other two PC’s can 1Gbit but because of my switch i use them in 100Mbit mode. And my laptop… It has 100Mbit connection also.

You can say that why you do not prefer to upgrade your switch and buy out a PCMCIA port for your laptop. I can’t. But this impossibility is not dedicated to my fault. It’s because in my country to follow technology beyond most people can not be! I searched all markets, shops, internet shops but i have no chance on finding a PCMCIA cart for my laptop and a 1Gbit switch.

So what are you doing you say.

I’m trying to reach nirvana while i’m sending 45GB of fresh downloaded DVD’s, Archives, Education Videos (It’s a huge set consisting of so many legal ( and some illegal ) things ) to my storage drive. I hope this patience will be raise my rank on the God’s eyes.

Patience must be first virtue in computer related world i think. If not i’ll be confused of my time which i spent on waiting data transfers using 100Mbit connection!

I don’t know why but my laptop is uncompatible with Adobe PDF Reader. I try to examine the cause, lost lots of many time but cannot found out a solution. My Problem was the adobe updater. Whenever i start Adobe Pdf Reader to view a document adobe updater agent comes front and started to aet all unused CPU time. And also it is a un-endable process.

At last i was tired of this process cycle and tried to search for a fine alternative. I found Foxit PDF Reader. I’m using it for two months now. It’s a very little and rapid program. I cannot see the difference between adobe reader. “A reader is a reader” is the main point of my philosophy.

I can freely suggest you to use that program if you’re tired of adobe updater.