stonetable.org

If anyone is local to the Chicago area (or willing to drive over for the weekend *cough*detroit guys*cough*) send me an email or hit me on IRC. I need to get someone the weekend of August 27th to help configure servers, and the weekend of September 3rd to go to the data center, install, and test in a real environment.

I need someone comfortable installing Linux (Ubuntu) and configuring some services (Apache2, Postgresql, etc). I’m super busy so I could use an extra pair of hands to hang out with me and get six servers installed. Food, housing (if needed) and money will be provided
At the data center, we’ll be bringing in these servers, installing them in the rack hooking them into the switch and testing everything. It’ll be a fun, geeky time.

I’m writing a new web application using mod_perl 2.0. It’s heavy on network I/O so I’m doing some benchmarking and testing with simulated I/O to see just how many requests/second I can expect a single server to handle. While reading through Practical mod_perl I discovered one of the greatest tools ever: ab.

stone@moradin:~ $ ab -n 5000 -c 10 http://localhost/echo
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev < $Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 500 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 1500 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 2500 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 3500 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 4500 requests
Finished 5000 requests

Server Software: Apache/2.0.54
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /echo
Document Length: 33 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 2.326156 seconds
Complete requests: 5000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1145916 bytes
HTML transferred: 165132 bytes
Requests per second: 2149.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4.652 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.465 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 481.05 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 0.7 1 8
Processing: 2 2 1.2 3 10
Waiting: 0 1 0.9 2 8
Total: 3 3 1.2 4 11
WARNING: The median and mean for the waiting time are not within a normal deviation
These results are probably not that reliable.

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4
66% 4
75% 4
80% 4
90% 4
95% 5
98% 7
99% 7
100% 11 (longest request)

This is awesome. Not only does it rock, but it’s included by default with Apache.

Why is this blogworthy, you ask? Because I wrote it. I can’t claim for the design or graphics. I’m not talented in that area. I did, however, build the custom content management system that allows them to manage their catalog of games as well as integrate that with the HTML from the designer to turn it into a full-fledged dynamic site.

Last February I quit my job to pursue other ventures, this being one of them. There were some nervous moments but overall things have gone well. We’re not out of the woods by any means but at least we can see the path widening before us.

I still have a month or so of work left on the contract and by then yet another venture should be doing well enough to keep a roof over my head for a while. For now though, it’s time to catch up on my sleep. It’s been a long three weeks pre-launch.