[COLUG] Centos version questions, and a few others..

[Duane]

Tom Hanlon wrote:

> Still i would like to hear what your programming language was and what
> your application was and if you did any performance benchmarks or other
> tests ?

The project in question isn't really anything special, I just have a
home weather station and existing apps didn't make much sense to me
because why collect and store a whole lot of info, when stats can be
generated on the fly instead, reducing CPU load/spikes to nil due to
stats generating.

I used PHP, no performance benchmarks, the app had other criteria, old
P255Mhz with 128M of ram, the reason I went down this path was so the
data could be shared between a backend listening on a serial port
collecting data and a website frontend displaying things in a meaningful
way.

> It seems like much of the "smarts" of using  memcached is handled by the
> libraries in the applications. I will start with PHP but if Perl or Ruby
> or something is better, please let me know.

memcache is basically shared memory with TCP access, so yes if you are
clustering memcache should be advantageous.

However in my situation a simple shared memory solution was the simpler
and I assume better option, less points of failure, no middle layer
adding extra overhead and no TCP layer for the same reason.

I'm not sure that there would be many smarts in memcache or its
libraries, it basically serialises and compresses data and dumps the
results to a shared memory segment which is pretty much identical to
what I'm doing except I haven't bothered with compression in my app as
it wasn't essential at this stage.

> I know, for some superstitious reason I so far have stayed away from
> virtualized machines. Besides it is too late, I needed to move fast. I

This is where virtualisation leaps ahead, some providers setup your
virtual OS within minutes of receiving payment, also most providers
offer a web/console to remote console, rebuild, restart and even offline
file system access, so on and so forth so if/when you screw up you
haven't truly screwed up too badly.

-- 

Best regards,
 Duane

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