When to touch swappiness

There are lots of discussion on the lists on whether to touch or not to touch /proc/sys/vm/swappiness parameter and there is not definitive answers on that. I figured out a situation when tuning the parameter can really improve the performance.


On the machine:

• RAID-1 of three HDDs
• 12 GB RAM
• Apache Cassandra instance with 25 GB of data
• ejabberd instance

The IO is created by Cassandra, which reads many random data pages and occasionally writes sequential 100-200 Mb chunks of data. Also some IO is created by swapping ejabberd memory in and out.

So most write load is created by swapping out random ejabberd memory pages. And we know that RAID-1 is N times better on read than on write. Decreasing swappiness parameter from 60 to 20 I moved IO load from write to read. There left almost no random spaw writes.

The IO load has really decreased. Not a huge optimization, but worth doing.

Apache Cassandra experience

At one of my projects I switched from Postgresql to Cassandra. There were reasons for the switch.

First. For each user I had to keep an inbox for storing incoming messages and events. What is inbox? It is a sorted collection of items. Items are accessed using ranged queries. This caused huge IO overhead on Postgres, because of lack of clustered indexes. All "tables" in Cassandra are clustered, because they are kept as SST (sorted string tables).

Second. My application had huge write throughput. Postgres is good at write with all that write-ahead logs and absence of table-locks on write. And even after write-aware optimizations it still was not enough. Cassandra's data write process is completely different. And it better suits my needs.

Third. Application servers are Python Twisted applications. There is one Postgres binding for Twisted and it is abandoned and buggy. Cassandra API is available via Thrift, which in turn supports Twisted. I recommend great Telephus wrapper for Thrift and Twisted.

At Cassandra's IRC channel people are telling each other of their Cassandra clusters. I look a bit stupid when saying I have a single node. But who cares? If it works better than Postgres for me - why not?

Disclaimer: I am not telling here that Cassandra is better than Postgresql. It just suits better in this certain application. I use Postgresql a lot at in many other projects.

Google AppEngine Experience

At first glance, AppEngine is really nice with all that cloud-computing. Pay only for what you use. Scale indefinitely. Of course, you have some limitations, like custom (Python or Java) environment with predefined APIs. But APIs are really good and mostly sufficient.

At second glance, AppEngine is really, really nice! You'll fine a great toolset in SDK and application management console. Version management, quota settings, convenient shell scripts in SDK for deployment and testing. Also log managers, kind of simple profiler, etc. I cant imagine how many efforts were spent on the toolset.

At third glance you'll find AppEngine unusable.

• After two years of being released there are unexpected errors in the management console. Sometimes I cannot enter it for some hours.
• When you need to delete a table from datastore - cross your fingers. Sometimes a certain table becomes corrupted and you cannot delete it. Only application recreation helps.
• AppEngine pricing claims 10 cents for CPU hour. Good. But you have to use the CPU through the API. When I tried to upload my 1 GB database to AppEngine, it took some hours of real time and some days of AppEngine CPU time. It cost me about $60 just to upload my database! I have to admit, this is hard part. But Postgresql does this database back and forth in minutes!
• Finally, I managed to port my application and to upload all the data. But the cost per pageview is tremendous. I would cost me hundreds bucks a month instead of current inexpensive dedicated server (which is busy about 10% at peaks).

Relay auth to an XMPP component

Standard ejabberd auth modules include odbc, ldap, external (with script). Also there is original module "internal" which hosts users data in Mnesia. But sometimes these modules are not enough.

Writing a custom auth module for ejabberd is easy. Copy, for example, ejabberd_auth_internal.erl and replace its interface methods with your own.

Recently I needed to relay auth to an XMPP component. I have to make an IQ inside check_password method. The problem is that check_password is called in user session process and routing for the session does not work yet. This means, you wont receive XMPP stanzas in this method by calling receive.

Take a look at the working snippet:


check_password(User, Server, Password) ->
    SelfJid = jlib:string_to_jid(Server),
    AuthJid = jlib:string_to_jid("profile1." ++ Server),
    IQGet = #iq{
      type = get,
      sub_el = [{xmlelement, "query", [{"xmlns", ?NS_SUP_AUTH}, {"user", User}, {"password", Password}], []}]
     },
    Pid = self(),

    F = fun(IQReply) ->
                Pid ! IQReply
        end,

    ejabberd_local:route_iq(SelfJid, AuthJid, IQGet, F),

    receive #iq{type = result} ->
            true;
    Other ->
            ?INFO_MSG("Auth IQ for ~s failed: ~p", [User, Other]),
            false
    end.

profile1.server.com is a JID of the auth component. The component receives an IQ with user id and password and returns "result" IQ if auth is fine, "error" otherwise.

The trick here is to use ejabberd_local:route_iq. But then we need to block the call flow of check_password until the auth component returns us the result. route_iq takes a function parameter which is called in local router process. It routes the reply back to a function basing on its own IQ id -> function map. Another trick is to make our original (client) process pid to reside in function's closure. Then we can safely block with receive and wait for a message from the function.

Thinkpad T61 warranty repair

I've been using T61 for about two years and a half.
Recently the screen flashed and turned off while I was working. It didnt turn on any more.

I had checked my serial number at Lenovo site and happily discovered that few months of warranty left.

It took almost three weeks to fix. They changed LCD display (this was expected), then motherboard and the panel with touchpad. Seems motherboard had burnt out together with LCD. And plastic panel was a bit damaged - they replaced it too :)

Why my Android sucks

I've been using HTC Legend with Android 2.1 for about two months. There are few major things that make the experience much worser than it could be:

• The device is unable to play popular video formats (divx, xvid, etc) out of the box. The only usable video format is H264 - you have to convert video to it.
• Android Market does not work for Russia - what a crap? There are alternatives, but anyways. Apple AppStore is already here, btw.
• I cannot send files via Bluetooth from device to PC and vice versa. At the same time SE z530i <-> Legend works fine, PC <-> SE z530i both work fine. Maybe Ubuntu at my PC lacks some BT profiles (Bluetooth FTP, I guess). But it is a problem of device, not Ubuntu, because HTC Legend is a consumer product, and it should support everything.
• I cannot create complex Wi-Fi connections with fixed IP and VPN. iPod can do it easily.
• It has annoying glitches in base preinstalled software, for example Weather Widget.

Advance Wars for Android

As always, my dream project was already implemented by someone else.

Advance Wars, my favourite game for Game Boy Advance was reinvented for Android.

Battle for Mars is a remake of original game, leaving most of tactics gameplay fun but with different storyline and graphics.

Actually there is zero storyline, comparing to original game. And wholly, it is actually worser than original game :) But I like it anyways.

Bitbucket

Last month I've been using Bitbucket for hosting my company's Mercurial repository.

I am admire of SaaS approach, but Bitbucket has succeeded proving me the opposite.
My repository is unavailable right now. And this happens much more offen than I expected from service dedicated for code hosting. pull/push operations take long time (up to 5-10 seconds). I have no idea how to make Mercurial so slow.

Maybe I'll give Assembla a try. But more probable, I'll rent a small VDS at Gandi and deploy my own Mercurial installation there.