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At Velocity, I saw Adam Langley give a great presentation entitled Overclocking SSL. Last week Adam posted a distilled version of the Overclocking SSL presentation on his blog. He covers many topics for improving SSL performance. Unfortunately, his recommendations are decidedly focused on how Google runs their servers, and not a practical guide to how to improve your performance with a more standa

Logging for Humans A printf style format string is the de facto method of logging for almost all software written in the last 20 years. This style of logging crosses almost all programing language boundaries. Many libraries build upon this, adding log levels and various transports, but they are still centered around a formated string. I believe the widespread use of format strings in logging is ba

In my previous post, I glossed over our team switching from Python to Node.js. I kept it brief because the switch wasn’t the focus of the post, but since I believe I am being misunderstood, I will explain it in depth: Cloudkick was primarily written in Python. Most backend services were written in Twisted Python. The API endpoints and web server were written in Django, and used mod_wsgi. We felt t

Earlier this week we announced a new product: Rackspace Cloud Monitoring. It is just starting as a (free) private beta, so if you want to try it out, be sure to sign up via the survey here. Transition from Cloudkick Technology Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is based on technology built originally for the Cloudkick product. Some core concepts and parts of the architecture originated from Cloudkick, but

Last Thursday I went to the Joyent office for Node Office Hours — I wanted to talk to Isaac about running a private NPM registry. Isaac answered my questions about private NPM registries, but Matt Ranney explained a more interesting problem. He was dialed into a conference call line for Node Office hours (he is currently living in Hawaii.) Matt explained that he is using the new TLS module in Node

Lets say you are writing your new awesome web application in Node.js, because you know, Node.js is the new hotness and awesome. Lets also say, your new Node.js web application does non-trivial things, and hits a limited backend resource. You can’t rewrite this backend system in the new hotness of async Node.js yet, so it can only handle 10 concurrent clients. This should be a very common situation

**The Past and Present ** I’ve written dozens of event loops for network services, in C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, Lua, Go and probably other languages at this point.  They all make me reinvent handling of events, none of them are perfect, some are faster than others, but in the end, it is a waste of my time to rewrite them. My recent favorites has been a combination of C for the low level event lo

The module formally known as mod_wombat was renamed mod_lua, and has pulled into the Apache HTTP Server trunk, and will be part of the future 2.4 stable release. For an example of why it is cool, lets look at replacing a common task with mod_rewrite: Blocking Image Theft. The HTTPD wiki even has an example of how to do this for us: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !="" RewriteCond %{HT

After using Rhino for server side javascript at work, I can say I somewhat like server side javascript.  Others like Steve were already convinced a long time ago. However, I don’t really like being tied into the whole Java world because of it. When Google released their v8 Javascript Engine earlier this year, I always wanted to build an Apache Module for it. This afternoon I had some time, and so

If you care about distributed systems, you need to read the paper about Amazon’s Dynamo. Comments: Making node joining/leaving an administrative command is not something most academics consider, but it significantly reduces complexity.  We made a similar decision with the PodServer system for Bloglines.  I believe this is the right decision, since a node changing membership on the long term is a r

Many people know about the old school mod_fastcgi, but very few know about mod_fcgid. To put it extremely briefly, if you are using Apache 2, and you should be, you should be using modfcgid, and not modfastcgi. Here quick guide on how to configure mod_fcgid for use with Apache HTTPD 2.2.0 and Typo, a RoR blog engine: Download and Prepare mod_fcgid wget http://fastcgi.coremail.cn/mod_fcgid.1.07.tar