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• Few iPhone noob questions

  - by mshsayem

  Why should I declare local variables as 'static' inside a method? Like: static NSString *cellIdentifier = @"Cell"; Is it a performance advantage? (I know what 'static' does; in C context) What does this syntax mean?[someObj release], someObj = nil; Two statements? Why should I assign nil again? Is not 'release' enough? Should I do it for all objects I allocate/own? Or for just view objects? Why does everyone copy NSString, but retains other objects (in property declaration)? Yes, NSStrings can be changed, but other objects can be changed also, right? Then why 'copy' for just NSString, not for all? Is it just a defensive convention? Shouldn't I release constant NSString? Like here:NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; Why not? Does the compiler allocate/deallocate it for me? In some tutorial application I observed these (Built with IB): Properties(IBOutlet, with same ivar name): window, someLabel, someTextField, etc etc... In the dealloc method, although the window ivar was released, others were not. My question is: WHY? Shouldn't I release other ivars(labels, textField) as well? Why not? Say, I have 3 cascaded drop-down lists. I mean, based on what is selected on the first list, 2nd list is populated and based on what is selected on the second list, 3rd list is populated. What UI components can reflect this best? How is drop-down list presented in iPhone UI? Tableview with UIPicker? When should I update the 2nd, 3rd list? Or just three labels which have touch events? Can you give me some good example tutorials about Core-Data? (Not just simple data fetching and storing on 2/3 tables with 1/2 relationship) How can I know whether my app is leaking memory? Any tools?

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• Using pointers, references, handles to generic datatypes, as generic and flexible as possible

  - by Patrick

  In my application I have lots of different data types, e.g. Car, Bicycle, Person, ... (they're actually other data types, but this is just for the example). Since I also have quite some 'generic' code in my application, and the application was originally written in C, pointers to Car, Bicycle, Person, ... are often passed as void-pointers to these generic modules, together with an identification of the type, like this: Car myCar; ShowNiceDialog ((void *)&myCar, DATATYPE_CAR); The 'ShowNiceDialog' method now uses meta-information (functions that map DATATYPE_CAR to interfaces to get the actual data out of Car) to get information of the car, based on the given data type. That way, the generic logic only has to be written once, and not every time again for every new data type. Of course, in C++ you could make this much easier by using a common root class, like this class RootClass { public: string getName() const = 0; }; class Car : public RootClass { ... }; void ShowNiceDialog (RootClass *root); The problem is that in some cases, we don't want to store the data type in a class, but in a totally different format to save memory. In some cases we have hundreds of millions of instances that we need to manage in the application, and we don't want to make a full class for every instance. Suppose we have a data type with 2 characteristics: A quantity (double, 8 bytes) A boolean (1 byte) Although we only need 9 bytes to store this information, putting it in a class means that we need at least 16 bytes (because of the padding), and with the v-pointer we possibly even need 24 bytes. For hundreds of millions of instances, every byte counts (I have a 64-bit variant of the application and in some cases it needs 6 GB of memory). The void-pointer approach has the advantage that we can almost encode anything in a void-pointer and decide how to use it if we want information from it (use it as a real pointer, as an index, ...), but at the cost of type-safety. Templated solutions don't help since the generic logic forms quite a big part of the application, and we don't want to templatize all this. Additionally, the data model can be extended at run time, which also means that templates won't help. Are there better (and type-safer) ways to handle this than a void-pointer? Any references to frameworks, whitepapers, research material regarding this?

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• C# Property Access vs Interface Implementation

  - by ehdv

  I'm writing a class to represent a Pivot Collection, the root object recognized by Pivot. A Collection has several attributes, a list of facet categories (each represented by a FacetCategory object) and a list of items (each represented by a PivotItem object). Therefore, an extremely simplified Collection reads: public class Collection { private List<FacetCategory> categories; private List<PivotItem> items; // other attributes } What I'm unsure of is how to properly grant access to those two lists. Because declaration order of both facet categories and items is visible to the user, I can't use sets, but the class also shouldn't allow duplicate categories or items. Furthermore, I'd like to make the Collection object as easy to use as possible. So my choices are: Have Collection implement IList<PivotItem> and have accessor methods for FacetCategory: In this case, one would add an item to Collection foo by writing foo.Add(bar). This works, but since a Collection is equally both kinds of list making it only pass as a list for one type (category or item) seems like a subpar solution. Create nested wrapper classes for List (CategoryList and ItemList). This has the advantage of making a consistent interface but the downside is that these properties would no longer be able to serve as lists (because I need to override the non-virtual Add method I have to implement IList rather than subclass List. Implicit casting wouldn't work because that would return the Add method to its normal behavior. Also, for reasons I can't figure out, IList is missing an AddRange method... public class Collection { private class CategoryList: IList<FacetCategory> { // ... } private readonly CategoryList categories = new CategoryList(); private readonly ItemList items = new ItemList(); public CategoryList FacetCategories { get { return categories; } set { categories.Clear(); categories.AddRange(value); } } public ItemList Items { get { return items; } set { items.Clear(); items.AddRange(value); } } } Finally, the third option is to combine options one and two, so that Collection implements IList<PivotItem> and has a property FacetCategories. Question: Which of these three is most appropriate, and why?

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• Best of both worlds: browser and desktop game?

  - by Ricket

  When considering a platform for a game, I've decided on multi-platform (Win/Lin/Mac) but can't make up my mind as far as browser vs. desktop. As I'm not all too far in development, and now having second thoughts, I'd like your opinion! Browser-based games using Java applets: market penetration is reasonably high (for version 6, it's somewhere around 60% I believe?) using JOGL, 3D performance/quality is decent; certainly good enough to render the crappy 3D graphics that I make there's the (small?) possibility of porting something to Android great for an audience of gamers who switch computers often; can sit down at any computer, load a webpage and play it also great for casual gamers or less knowledgeable gamers who are quite happy with playing games in a browser but don't want to install more things to their computer written in a high-level language which I am more familiar with than C++ - but at the same time, I would like to improve my skills with C++ as it is probably where I am headed in the game industry once I get out of school... easier update process: reload the page. Desktop games using good ol' C++ and OpenGL 100% market penetration, assuming complete cross-platform; however, that number reduces when you consider how many people will go through downloading and installing an executable compared to just browsing to a webpage and hitting "yes" to a security warning. more trouble to maintain the cross-platform; but again, for learning purposes I would embrace the challenge and the knowledge I would gain better performance all around true full screen, whereas browser games often struggle with smooth full screen graphics (especially on Linux, in my experience) can take advantage of distribution platforms such as Steam more likely to be considered a "real" game, whereas browser and Java games are often dismissed as not being real games and therefore not played by "hardcore gamers" installer can be large; don't have to worry so much about download times Is there a way to have the best of both worlds? I love Java applets, but I also really like the reasons to write a desktop game. I don't want to constantly port everything between a Java applet project and a C++ project; that would be twice the work! Unity chose to write their own web player plugin. I don't like this, because I am one of the people that will not install their web player for anything, and I don't see myself being able to convince my audience to install a browser plugin. What are my options? Are there other examples out there besides Unity, of games that have browser and desktop versions? Did I leave out anything in the pro/con lists above?

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• .Net Remote Log Querying

  - by jlafay

  I have a Win Service that I'm working on that consists of the service, WF Service (using WorkflowServiceHost), a Workflow (WorkflowApplication) that queries/processes data from a SQL Server DB, and a Comm Marshall class that handles data flow between the service and the WF. The WF does a lot of heavy data processing and the original app (early VB6) logged all the processing and displayed the results on the screen of the host machine. Critical events will be committed to eventlog because I strongly believe that should be common practice because admins naturally will look there and because it already has support for remote viewing. The workflow will also need to write logging events as it processes and iterates according to our business logic. Such as: records queried, records returned, processed records, etc. The data is very critical and we need to log actions as they occur. The logs are currently kept as text files on disk and I think that is ok. Ideally I would like to record log events in XML so it's easier to query and because it is less costly than a DB, especially since our DB servers do a lot of heavy processing anyways. Since we are replacing essentially a VB6 application with a robust windows service (taking advantage of WF 4.0), it has been requested that a remote client also be created. It receives callbacks from the service after subscribing to it and being added to a collection of subscribers. Basic statistics and summaries are updated client side after receiving basic monitoring data of what is going on with the service. We would like to also provide a way to provide details when we need to examine what is going on further because this is a long running data processing service and issues need to be addressed immediately. What is the best way to implement some type of query from the client that is sent to the service and returned to the client? Would it be efficient to implement another method to expose on the service and then have that pass that off to some querying class/object to examine the XML files by whichever specification and then return it to the client? That's the main concern. I don't want the service to processing to bottleneck much while this occurs. It seems that WF already auto-magically threads well for the most part but I want to make sure this is the right way to go about it. Any suggestions/recommendations on how to architect and implement a small log querying framework for a remote service would be awesome.

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• markdown to HTML with customised WMD editor

  - by spirytus

  For my application I customized slightly the way WMD behaves so when user enters empty lines, these are reflected in HTML output as <br />'s. Now I came to a point when I should store it somewhere at backend and so after going thru SO posts for a while I'm not sure what is the best way to do it. I have few options and if you could point out which their pros/cons that would be much appreciated. send to server and store as markdown rather than HTML. To me obvious advantage would be keeping exactly same formatting as user originally entered. But then how can I convert it back to HTML for display to a client? It seems very troublesome to convert it on client side as even if it would be possible what would happen if JS would be disabled? If I wanted to do it on the server, then standard server side implementations of markup to HTML might be resource expensive. Would that be an issue in your opinion? Even if it wouldn't be the case then as I mentioned my WMD implementation is customised and those server side solutions wouldn't probably do the right conversion to markdown anyway and there always would be a risk that something would convert wrong. Send to server as converted HTML. Same as above.. conversion on client side would be difficult, server side same with possibility of getting it wrong. send original markdown and converted HTML and store both. No performance issues related to converting markdown to HTML on client side, nor on server side. Users would have always same markdown they originally entered and same HTML they originally saw in preview (possibly sanitized in php though). It would have to take twice that much storage space though and that is my biggest worry. I tend to lean towards 3rd solution as it seems simplest, but there is a worry of doubled storage space needed for this solution. Please bear in mind that my implementation of WMD is slightly modified and also I'm going with PHP/MySql server side implementation. So apart from 3 options I listed above, are there any other possible solutions to my problem? Did I miss anything important that would make one of the options above better then the rest? And what other pros/cons would apply to each solution I listed? Also how is it implemented on SO? I read somwhere that they using option 3, and so if its good enough for SO would be good enough for me :) but not sure if its true anyway, so how is it done? Also please forgive me, but at least for once I got to say that StackOverflow IS THE BEST DAMN RESOURCE ON THE WEB and I truly appreciate all the people trying to help others here! The site and users here are simply amazing!

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• Implementing coroutines in Java

  - by JUST MY correct OPINION

  This question is related to my question on existing coroutine implementations in Java. If, as I suspect, it turns out that there is no full implementation of coroutines currently available in Java, what would be required to implement them? As I said in that question, I know about the following: You can implement "coroutines" as threads/thread pools behind the scenes. You can do tricksy things with JVM bytecode behind the scenes to make coroutines possible. The so-called "Da Vinci Machine" JVM implementation has primitives that make coroutines doable without bytecode manipulation. There are various JNI-based approaches to coroutines also possible. I'll address each one's deficiencies in turn. Thread-based coroutines This "solution" is pathological. The whole point of coroutines is to avoid the overhead of threading, locking, kernel scheduling, etc. Coroutines are supposed to be light and fast and to execute only in user space. Implementing them in terms of full-tilt threads with tight restrictions gets rid of all the advantages. JVM bytecode manipulation This solution is more practical, albeit a bit difficult to pull off. This is roughly the same as jumping down into assembly language for coroutine libraries in C (which is how many of them work) with the advantage that you have only one architecture to worry about and get right. It also ties you down to only running your code on fully-compliant JVM stacks (which means, for example, no Android) unless you can find a way to do the same thing on the non-compliant stack. If you do find a way to do this, however, you have now doubled your system complexity and testing needs. The Da Vinci Machine The Da Vinci Machine is cool for experimentation, but since it is not a standard JVM its features aren't going to be available everywhere. Indeed I suspect most production environments would specifically forbid the use of the Da Vinci Machine. Thus I could use this to make cool experiments but not for any code I expect to release to the real world. This also has the added problem similar to the JVM bytecode manipulation solution above: won't work on alternative stacks (like Android's). JNI implementation This solution renders the point of doing this in Java at all moot. Each combination of CPU and operating system requires independent testing and each is a point of potentially frustrating subtle failure. Alternatively, of course, I could tie myself down to one platform entirely but this, too, makes the point of doing things in Java entirely moot. So... Is there any way to implement coroutines in Java without using one of these four techniques? Or will I be forced to use the one of those four that smells the least (JVM manipulation) instead?

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• Algorithm to split an article without breaking the reading flow or HTML code

  - by Victor Stanciu

  Hello, I have a very large database of articles, of varying lengths. The articles have HTML elements in them. I have to insert some ads (simple <script> elements) in the body of each article when it is displayed (I know, I hate ads that interrupt my reading too). Now, the problem is that each ad must be inserted at about the same position in each article. The simplest solution is to simply split the article on a fixed number of characters (without breaking words), and insert the ad code. This, however, runs the risk of inserting the ad in the middle of a HTML tag. I could go the regex way, but I was thinking about the following solution, using JS: Establish a character count threshold. For example, "the add should be inserted at about 200 words" Set accepted deviations in each direction, say -20, +20 characters. Loop through each text node inside the article, and while doing so, keep count of the total number of characters so far Once the count exceeds the threshold, make the following decision: 4.1. If count exceeds the threshold by a value lower that the positive accepted deviation (for example, 17 characters), insert the ad code just after the current text node. 4.2. If the count is greater than the sum of the threshold and the deviation, roll back to the previous text node, and make the same decision, only this time use the previous count and check if it's lower than the difference between the threshold and the deviation, and if not, insert the ad between the current node and the previous one. 4.3. If the 4.1 and 4.2 fail (which means that the previous node reached a too low character count and the current node a too high one), insert the ad after whatever character count is needed inside the current element. I know it's convoluted, but it's the first thing out of my mind and it has the advantage that, by trying to insert the ad between text nodes, perhaps it will not break the flow of the article as bad as it would if I would just stick it in (like the final 4.3 case) Here is some pseudo-code I put together, I don't trust my english-explaining skills: threshold = 200 deviation = 20 current_count = 0 for each node in article_nodes { previous_count = current_count current_count = current_count + node.length if current_count < threshold { continue // next interation } if current_count > threshold + deviation { if previous_count < threshdold - deviation { // insert ad in current node } else { // insert ad between the current and previous nodes } } else { // insert ad after the current node } break; } Am I over-complicating stuff, or am I missing a simpler, more elegant solution?

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• ASP.NET MVC: How can I explain an invalid type violation to an end-user with Html.ValidationSummary?

  - by Terminal Frost

  Serious n00b warning here; please take mercy! So I finished the Nerd Dinner MVC Tutorial and I'm now in the process of converting a VB.NET application to ASP.NET MVC using the Nerd Dinner program as a sort of rough template. I am using the "IsValid / GetRuleViolations()" pattern to identify invalid user input or values that violate business rules. I am using LINQ to SQL and am taking advantage of the "OnValidate()" hook that allows me to run the validation and throw an application exception upon trying to save changes to the database via the CustomerRepository class. Anyway, everything works well, except that by the time the form values reach my validation method invalid types have already been converted to a default or existing value. (I have a "StreetNumber" property that is an integer, though I imagine this would be a problem for DateTime or any other non-strings as well.) Now, I am guessing that the UpdateModel() method throws an exception and then alters the value because the Html.ValidationMessage is displayed next to the StreetNumber field but my validation method never sees the original input. There are two problems with this: While the Html.ValidationMessage does signal that something is wrong, there is no corresponding entry in the Html.ValidationSummary. If I could even get the exception message to show up there indicating an invalid cast or something that would be better than nothing. My validation method which resides in my Customer partial class never sees the original user input so I do not know if the problem is a missing entry or an invalid type. I can't figure out how I can keep my validation logic nice and neat in one place and still get access to the form values. I could of course write some logic in the View that processes the user input, however that seems like the exact opposite of what I should be doing with MVC. Do I need a new validation pattern or is there some way to pass the original form values to my model class for processing? CustomerController Code // POST: /Customers/Edit/[id] [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection formValues) { Customer customer = customerRepository.GetCustomer(id); try { UpdateModel(customer); customerRepository.Save(); return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = customer.AccountID }); } catch { foreach (var issue in customer.GetRuleViolations()) ModelState.AddModelError(issue.PropertyName, issue.ErrorMessage); } return View(customer); }

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• Commitment to Zend Framework - any arguments against?

  - by Pekka

  I am refurbishing a big CMS that I have been working on for quite a number of years now. The product itself is great, but some components, the Database and translation classes for example, need urgent replacing - partly self-made as far back as 2002, grown into a bit of a chaos over time, and might have trouble surviving a security audit. So, I've been looking closely at a number of frameworks (or, more exactly, component Libraries, as I do not intend to change the basic structure of the CMS) and ended up with liking Zend Framework the best. They offer a solid MVC model but don't force you into it, and they offer a lot of professional components that have obviously received a lot of attention (Did you know there are multiple plurals in Russian, and you can't translate them using a simple ($number == 0) or ($number > 1) switch? I didn't, but Zend_Translate can handle it. Just to illustrate the level of thorougness the library seems to have been built with.) I am now literally at the point of no return, starting to replace key components of the system by the Zend-made ones. I'm not really having second thoughts - and I am surely not looking to incite a flame war - but before going onward, I would like to step back for a moment and look whether there is anything speaking against tying a big system closely to Zend Framework. What I like about Zend: As far as I can see, very high quality code Extremely well documented, at least regarding introductions to how things work (Haven't had to use detailed API documentation yet) Backed by a company that has an interest in seeing the framework prosper Well received in the community, has a considerable user base Employs coding standards I like Comes with a full set of unit tests Feels to me like the right choice to make - or at least, one of the right choices - in terms of modern, professional PHP development. I have been thinking about encapsulating and abstracting ZF's functionality into own classes to be able to switch frameworks more easily, but have come to the conclusion that this would not be a good idea because: it would be an unnecessary level of abstraction it could cost performance the big advantage of using a framework - the existence of a developer base that is familiar with its components - would partly be cancelled out therefore, the commitment to ZF would be a deep one. Thus my question: Is there anything substantial speaking against committing to the Zend Framework? Do you have insider knowledge of plans of Zend Inc.'s to go evil in 2011, and make it a closed source library? Is Zend Inc. run by vampires? Are there conceptual flaws in the code base you start to notice when you've transitioned all your projects to it? Is the appearance of quality code an illusion? Does the code look good, but run terribly slow on anything below my quad-core workstation?

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• How to reduce redundant code when adding new c++0x rvalue reference operator overloads

  - by Inverse

  I am adding new operator overloads to take advantage of c++0x rvalue references, and I feel like I'm producing a lot of redundant code. I have a class, tree, that holds a tree of algebraic operations on double values. Here is an example use case: tree x = 1.23; tree y = 8.19; tree z = (x + y)/67.31 - 3.15*y; ... std::cout << z; // prints "(1.23 + 8.19)/67.31 - 3.15*8.19" For each binary operation (like plus), each side can be either an lvalue tree, rvalue tree, or double. This results in 8 overloads for each binary operation: // core rvalue overloads for plus: tree operator +(const tree& a, const tree& b); tree operator +(const tree& a, tree&& b); tree operator +(tree&& a, const tree& b); tree operator +(tree&& a, tree&& b); // cast and forward cases: tree operator +(const tree& a, double b) { return a + tree(b); } tree operator +(double a, const tree& b) { return tree(a) + b; } tree operator +(tree&& a, double b) { return std::move(a) + tree(b); } tree operator +(double a, tree&& b) { return tree(a) + std::move(b); } // 8 more overloads for minus // 8 more overloads for multiply // 8 more overloads for divide // etc which also has to be repeated in a way for each binary operation (minus, multiply, divide, etc). As you can see, there are really only 4 functions I actually need to write; the other 4 can cast and forward to the core cases. Do you have any suggestions for reducing the size of this code? PS: The class is actually more complex than just a tree of doubles. Reducing copies does dramatically improve performance of my project. So, the rvalue overloads are worthwhile for me, even with the extra code. I have a suspicion that there might be a way to template away the "cast and forward" cases above, but I can't seem to think of anything.

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• Fixed strptime exception with thread lock, but slows down the program

  - by eWizardII

  I have the following code, which when is running inside of a thread (the full code is here - https://github.com/eWizardII/homobabel/blob/master/lovebird.py) for null in range(0,1): while True: try: with open('C:/Twitter/tweets/user_0_' + str(self.id) + '.json', mode='w') as f: f.write('[') threadLock.acquire() for i, seed in enumerate(Cursor(api.user_timeline,screen_name=self.ip).items(200)): if i>0: f.write(", ") f.write("%s" % (json.dumps(dict(sc=seed.author.statuses_count)))) j = j + 1 threadLock.release() f.write("]") except tweepy.TweepError, e: with open('C:/Twitter/tweets/user_0_' + str(self.id) + '.json', mode='a') as f: f.write("]") print "ERROR on " + str(self.ip) + " Reason: ", e with open('C:/Twitter/errors_0.txt', mode='a') as a_file: new_ii = "ERROR on " + str(self.ip) + " Reason: " + str(e) + "\n" a_file.write(new_ii) break Now without the thread lock I generate the following error: Exception in thread Thread-117: Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Python27\lib\threading.py", line 530, in __bootstrap_inner self.run() File "C:/Twitter/homobabel/lovebird.py", line 62, in run for i, seed in enumerate(Cursor(api.user_timeline,screen_name=self.ip).items(200)): File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\cursor.py", line 110, in next self.current_page = self.page_iterator.next() File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\cursor.py", line 85, in next items = self.method(page=self.current_page, *self.args, **self.kargs) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\binder.py", line 196, in _call return method.execute() File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\binder.py", line 182, in execute result = self.api.parser.parse(self, resp.read()) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\parsers.py", line 75, in parse result = model.parse_list(method.api, json) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\models.py", line 38, in parse_list results.append(cls.parse(api, obj)) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\models.py", line 49, in parse user = User.parse(api, v) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\models.py", line 86, in parse setattr(user, k, parse_datetime(v)) File "build\bdist.win-amd64\egg\tweepy\utils.py", line 17, in parse_datetime date = datetime(*(time.strptime(string, '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y')[0:6])) File "C:\Python27\lib\_strptime.py", line 454, in _strptime_time return _strptime(data_string, format)[0] File "C:\Python27\lib\_strptime.py", line 300, in _strptime _TimeRE_cache = TimeRE() File "C:\Python27\lib\_strptime.py", line 188, in __init__ self.locale_time = LocaleTime() File "C:\Python27\lib\_strptime.py", line 77, in __init__ raise ValueError("locale changed during initialization") ValueError: locale changed during initialization The problem is with thread lock on, each thread runs itself serially basically, and it takes way to long for each loop to run for there to be any advantage to having a thread anymore. So if there isn't a way to get rid of the thread lock, is there a way to have it run the for loop inside of the try statement faster?

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• Python: How best to parse a simple grammar?

  - by Rosarch

  Ok, so I've asked a bunch of smaller questions about this project, but I still don't have much confidence in the designs I'm coming up with, so I'm going to ask a question on a broader scale. I am parsing pre-requisite descriptions for a course catalog. The descriptions almost always follow a certain form, which makes me think I can parse most of them. From the text, I would like to generate a graph of course pre-requisite relationships. (That part will be easy, after I have parsed the data.) Some sample inputs and outputs: "CS 2110" => ("CS", 2110) # 0 "CS 2110 and INFO 3300" => [("CS", 2110), ("INFO", 3300)] # 1 "CS 2110, INFO 3300" => [("CS", 2110), ("INFO", 3300)] # 1 "CS 2110, 3300, 3140" => [("CS", 2110), ("CS", 3300), ("CS", 3140)] # 1 "CS 2110 or INFO 3300" => [[("CS", 2110)], [("INFO", 3300)]] # 2 "MATH 2210, 2230, 2310, or 2940" => [[("MATH", 2210), ("MATH", 2230), ("MATH", 2310)], [("MATH", 2940)]] # 3 If the entire description is just a course, it is output directly. If the courses are conjoined ("and"), they are all output in the same list If the course are disjoined ("or"), they are in separate lists Here, we have both "and" and "or". One caveat that makes it easier: it appears that the nesting of "and"/"or" phrases is never greater than as shown in example 3. What is the best way to do this? I started with PLY, but I couldn't figure out how to resolve the reduce/reduce conflicts. The advantage of PLY is that it's easy to manipulate what each parse rule generates: def p_course(p): 'course : DEPT_CODE COURSE_NUMBER' p[0] = (p[1], int(p[2])) With PyParse, it's less clear how to modify the output of parseString(). I was considering building upon @Alex Martelli's idea of keeping state in an object and building up the output from that, but I'm not sure exactly how that is best done. def addCourse(self, str, location, tokens): self.result.append((tokens[0][0], tokens[0][1])) def makeCourseList(self, str, location, tokens): dept = tokens[0][0] new_tokens = [(dept, tokens[0][1])] new_tokens.extend((dept, tok) for tok in tokens[1:]) self.result.append(new_tokens) For instance, to handle "or" cases: def __init__(self): self.result = [] # ... self.statement = (course_data + Optional(OR_CONJ + course_data)).setParseAction(self.disjunctionCourses) def disjunctionCourses(self, str, location, tokens): if len(tokens) == 1: return tokens print "disjunction tokens: %s" % tokens How does disjunctionCourses() know which smaller phrases to disjoin? All it gets is tokens, but what's been parsed so far is stored in result, so how can the function tell which data in result corresponds to which elements of token? I guess I could search through the tokens, then find an element of result with the same data, but that feel convoluted... What's a better way to approach this problem?

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• Difference between Cloud and Virtualization

  - by Akash Kava

  Ops: This does not belong to ServerFault because it focuses on Programing Architecture. I have following questions regarding differences between Cloud and Virtualization.. How Cloud is different then Virtualization? Currently I tried to find out pricing of Rackspace, Amazone and all similar cloud providers, I found that our current 6 dedicated servers came cheaper then their pricing. So how one can claim cloud is cheaper? Is it cheaper only in comparison of normal hosting? We re organized our infrastructure in virtual environment to reduce or configuration overhead at time of failure, we did not have to rewrite any peice of code that is already written for earlier setup. So moving to virtualization does not require any re programming. But cloud is absoltely different and it will require entire reprogramming right? Is it really worth to recode when our current IT costs are 3-4 times lower then cloud hosting including raid backups and all sort of clustering for high availability? New programming architecture means new overheads of training staff, new methods of testing and new deployment schemes, does it justify over "on demand resource usage" words of cloud? We are having current development architecture with simple Server side ASP.NET WebServices with no local context and on client side Flex/Silverlight which offers pretty good REST architecture and its highly scalable. How does cloud differs from REST model of deployment? On storage, SQL Server or MySQL offers pretty good replication and high availibility then what is advantage in cloud? Data guarantee, one of our vendor hosting some other customer's app on cloud (one of most used), lost Entire Hard Disk (the virtual) and entire module in first 6 months. Second provider said its your duty to take backup, fine I agree, but no provider gives SLA for data guarantee, they give 99% uptime. However in most business apps, uptime is less important then data integrity. In our 10 years of dedicated hosting experience we had only one hard disk crash. This makes me little skeptical to go for cloud and loosing control over data. And I feel its just a big marketing buzz to sell virtulization in different form. Size of data, currently all providers charge very heavy for large data, if you are hosting only below 100GB cloud can be good alternative, but I think virtual servers and dedicated servers above 100GB to few TBs are still cheaper. Why would want to pay so high on cloud when there is no data guarentee as well as it doesnt say anything about redundancy. (I wish SO had something for spell check for Internet Explorer, sorry for wrong spellings in my post)

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• Can I use the [] operator in C++ to create virtual arrays

  - by Shane MacLaughlin

  I have a large code base, originally C ported to C++ many years ago, that is operating on a number of large arrays of spatial data. These arrays contain structs representing point and triangle entities that represent surface models. I need to refactor the code such that the specific way these entities are stored internally varies for specific scenarios. For example if the points lie on a regular flat grid, I don't need to store the X and Y coordinates, as they can be calculated on the fly, as can the triangles. Similarly, I want to take advantage of out of core tools such as STXXL for storage. The simplest way of doing this is replacing array access with put and get type functions, e.g. point[i].x = XV; becomes Point p = GetPoint(i); p.x = XV; PutPoint(i,p); As you can imagine, this is a very tedious refactor on a large code base, prone to all sorts of errors en route. What I'd like to do is write a class that mimics the array by overloading the [] operator. As the arrays already live on the heap, and move around with reallocs, the code already assumes that references into the array such as point *p = point + i; may not be used. Is this class feasible to write? For example writing the methods below in terms of the [] operator; void MyClass::PutPoint(int Index, Point p) { if (m_StorageStrategy == RegularGrid) { int xoffs,yoffs; ComputeGridFromIndex(Index,xoffs,yoffs); StoreGridPoint(xoffs,yoffs,p.z); } else m_PointArray[Index] = p; } } Point MyClass::GetPoint(int Index) { if (m_StorageStrategy == RegularGrid) { int xoffs,yoffs; ComputeGridFromIndex(Index,xoffs,yoffs); return GetGridPoint(xoffs,yoffs); // GetGridPoint returns Point } else return m_PointArray[Index]; } } My concern is that all the array classes I've seen tend to pass by reference, whereas I think I'll have to pass structs by value. I think it should work put other than performance, can anyone see any major pitfalls with this approach. n.b. the reason I have to pass by value is to get point[a].z = point[b].z + point[c].z to work correctly where the underlying storage type varies.

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• How can I improve my select query for storing large versioned data sets?

  - by Jason Francis

  At work, we build large multi-page web applications, consisting mostly of radio and check boxes. The primary purpose of each application is to gather data, but as users return to a page they have previously visited, we report back to them their previous responses. Worst-case scenario, we might have up to 900 distinct variables and around 1.5 million users. For several reasons, it makes sense to use an insert-only approach to storing the data (as opposed to update-in-place) so that we can capture historical data about repeated interactions with variables. The net result is that we might have several responses per user per variable. Our table to collect the responses looks something like this: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[results]( [id] [bigint] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [userid] [int] NULL, [variable] [varchar](8) NULL, [value] [tinyint] NULL, [submitted] [smalldatetime] NULL) Where id serves as the primary key. Virtually every request results in a series of insert statements (one per variable submitted), and then we run a select to produce previous responses for the next page (something like this): SELECT t.id, t.variable, t.value FROM results t WITH (NOLOCK) WHERE t.userid = '2111846' AND (t.variable='internat' OR t.variable='veteran' OR t.variable='athlete') AND t.id IN (SELECT MAX(id) AS id FROM results WITH (NOLOCK) WHERE userid = '2111846' AND (t.variable='internat' OR t.variable='veteran' OR t.variable='athlete') GROUP BY variable) Which, in this case, would return the most recent responses for the variables "internat", "veteran", and "athlete" for user 2111846. We have followed the advice of the database tuning tools in indexing the tables, and against our data, this is the best-performing version of the select query that we have been able to come up with. Even so, there seems to be significant performance degradation as the table approaches 1 million records (and we might have about 150x that). We have a fairly-elegant solution in place for sharding the data across multiple tables which has been working quite well, but I am open for any advice about how I might construct a better version of the select query. We use this structure frequently for storing lots of independent data points, and we like the benefits it provides. So the question is, how can I improve the performance of the select query? I assume the nested select statement is a bad idea, but I have yet to find an alternative that performs as well. Thanks in advance. NB: Since we emphasize creating over reading in this case, and since we never update in place, there doesn't seem to be any penalty (and some advantage) for using the NOLOCK directive in this case.

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• Connection between Properties of Entities in Data Oriented Design

  - by sharethis

  I want to start with an example illustrating my question. The following way it is done in the most games. class car { vec3 position; vec3 rotation; mesh model; imge texture; void move(); // modify position and rotation void draw(); // use model, texture, ... }; vector<car> cars; for(auto i = cars.begin(); i != cars.end(); ++i) { i->move(); i->draw(); } Data oriented design means to process the same calculation on the hole batch of data at once. This way it takes more advantage out of the processor cache. struct movedata { vec3 position; vec3 rotation; }; struct drawdata { mesh model; imge texture; }; vector<movedata> movedatas; vector<drawdata> drawdatas; for(auto i = movedatas.begin(); i != movedatas.end(); ++i) { // modify position and rotation } for(auto i = drawdatas.begin(); i != drawdatas.end(); ++i) { // use model, texture, ... } But there comes a point where you need to find other properties according to an entity. For example if the car crashes, I do not need the drawdata and the movedata any more. So I need to delete the entries of this entity in all vectors. The entries are not linked by code. So my question is the following. How are properties of the same entity conceptually linked in a data oriented design?

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• Correct use of a "for...in" loop in javascript?

  - by jnkrois

  Hello everybody, before I ask my question I wanted to let everybody know that I appreciate the fact that there's always somebody out there willing to help, and on my end I'll try to give back to the community as much as I can. Thanks Now, I would like to get some pointers as to how to properly take advantage of the "for...in" loop in JavaScript, I already did some research and tried a couple things but it is still not clear to me how to properly use it. Let's say I have a random number of "select" tags in an HTML form, and I don't require the user to select an option for all of them, they can leave some untouched if they want. However I need to know if they selected none or at least one. The way I'm trying to find out if the user selected any of them is by using the "for...in" loop. For example: var allSelected = $("select option:selected"); var totalSelected = $("select option:selected").length; The first variable produces an array of all the selected options. The second variable tells me how many selected options I have in the form (select tags could be more than one and it changes every time). Now, in order to see if any has been selected I loop through each element (selected option), and retrieve the "value" attribute. The default "option" tag has a value="0", so if any selected option returns a value greater than 0, I know at least one option has been selected, however it does not have to be in order, this is my loop so far: for(var i = 0; i < totalSelected; i++){ var eachOption = $(allSelected[i]).val(); var defaultValue = 0; if(eachOption == defaultValue){ ...redirect to another page }else if(eachOption > defaultValue){ ... I display an alert } } My problem here is that as soon as the "if" matches a 0 value, it sends the user to the next page without testing the rest of the elements in the array, and the user could have selected the second or third options. What I really want to do is check all the elements in the array and then take the next action, in my mind this is how I could do it, but I'm not getting it right: var randomValue = 25; for(randomValue in allSelected){ var found = true; var notFound = false if(found){ display an alert }else{ redirect to next page } } This loop or the logic I'm using are flawed (I'm pretty sure), what I want to do is test all the elements in the array against a single variable and take the next action accordingly. I hope this makes some sense to you guys, any help would be appreciated. Thanks, JC

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• Instantiating custom PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer from spring context

  - by mmona

  I want to define a custom PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer in spring context xml. I want to use there multiple PropertySources, so that I can load part of the configuration from several property files and provide other part dynamically by my custom PropertySource implementation. The advantage is that it should be then easy to adjust the order of loading these property sources just by making modifications to the xml spring configuration. And here I run into a problem: how to define an arbitrary list of PropertySources and inject it into PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer, so that it uses the sources defined by me? Seems to be a basic thing that should be provided by spring, but since yesterday I cannot find a way to do it. Using namespace would enable me to load several property files, but I also need to define the id of the PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer (as other projects refer to it), and also I want to use my custom implementation. That is why I am defining the bean explicitly and not using the namespace. The most intuitive way would be to inject a list of PropertySources into PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer like this: <bean id="applicationPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer" class="org.springframework.context.support.PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer"> <property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true" /> <property name="ignoreResourceNotFound" value="true" /> <property name="order" value="0"/> <property name="propertySources"> <list> <!-- my PropertySource objects --> </list> </property> </bean> but unfortunately propertySources is of type PropertySources and does not accept a list. The PropertySources interface has one and only implementor which is MutablePropertySources, which indeed stores list of PropertySource objects, but has no constructor nor setter through which I can inject this list. It only has add*(PropertySource) methods. The only workaround I see now is to implement my own PropertySources class, extending MutablePropertySources, which would accept list of PropertySource objects on creation and manually add it via using add*(PropertySource) method. But why so much workaround would be needed to provide something that I thought was supposed to be the main reason of introducing the PropertySources (having flexible configuration manageable from spring configuration level). Please clarify what am I getting wrong :)

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• How do you handle authentication across domains?

  - by William Ratcliff

  I'm trying to save users of our services from having to have multiple accounts/passwords. I'm in a large organization and there's one group that handles part of user authentication for users who are from outside the facility (primarily for administrative functions). They store a secure cookie to establish a session and communicate only via HTTPS via the browser. Sessions expire either through: 1) explicit logout of the user 2) Inactivity 3) Browser closes My team is trying to write a web application to help users analyze data that they've taken (or are currently taking) while at our facility. We need to determine if a user is 1) authenticated 2) Some identifier for that user so we can store state for them (what analysis they are working on, etc.) So, the problem is how do you authenticate across domains (the authentication server for the other application lives in a border region between public and private--we will live in the public region). We have come up with some scenarios and I'd like advice about what is best practice, or if there is one we haven't considered. Let's start with the case where the user is authenticated with the authentication server. 1) The authentication server leaves a public cookie in the browser with their primary key for a user. If this is deemed sensitive, they encrypt it on their server and we have the key to decrypt it on our server. When the user visits our site, we check for this public cookie. We extract the user_id and use a public api for the authentication server to request if the user is logged in. If they are, they send us a response with: response={ userid :we can then map this to our own user ids. If necessary, we can request additional information such as email-address/display name once (to notify them if long running jobs are done, or to share results with other people, like with google_docs). account_is_active:Make sure that the account is still valid session_is_active: Is their session still active? If we query this for a valid user, this will have a side effect that we will reset the last_time_session_activated value and thus prolong their session with the authentication server last_time_session_activated: let us know how much time they have left ip_address_session_started_from:make sure the person at our site is coming from the same ip as they started the session at } Given this response, we either accept them as authenticated and move on with our app, or redirect them to the login page for the authentication server (question: if we give an encrypted portion of the response (signed by us) with the page to redirect them to, do we open any gaping security holes in the authentication server)? The flaw that we've found with this is that if the user visits evilsite.com and they look at the session cookie and send a query to the public api of the authentication server, they can keep the session alive and if our original user leaves the machine without logging out, then the next user will be able to access their session (this was possible before, but having the session alive eternally makes this worse). 2) The authentication server redirects all requests made to our domain to us and we send responses back through them to the user. Essentially, they act as a proxy. The advantage of this is that we can handshake with the authentication server, so it's safe to be trusted with the email address/name of the user and they don't have to reenter it So, if the user tries to go to: authentication_site/mysite_page1 they are redirected to mysite. Which would you choose, or is there a better way? The goal is to minimize the "Yet Another Password/Yet another username" problem... Thanks!!!!

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• Windows 7: How to place SuperFetch cache on an SSD?

  - by Ian Boyd

  I'm thinking of adding a solid state drive (SSD) to my existing Windows 7 installation. I know I can (and should) move my paging file to the SSD: Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs? Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size. In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD. What I don't know is if I even can put a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost cache) on the solid state drive. I want to get the benefit of Windows being able to cache gigabytes of frequently accessed data on a relativly small (e.g. 30GB) solid state drive. This is exactly what SuperFetch+ReadyBoost (or SuperFetch+ReadyDrive) was designed for. Will Windows offer (or let) me place a ReadyBoost cache on a solid state flash drive connected via SATA? A problem with the ReadyBoost cache over the ReadyDrive cache is that the ReadyBoost cache does not survive between reboots. The cache is encrypted with a per-session key, making its existing contents unusable during boot and SuperFetch pre-fetching during login. Update One I know that Windows Vista limited you to only one ReadyBoost.sfcache file (I do not know if Windows 7 removed that limitation): Q: Can use use multiple devices for EMDs? A: Nope. We've limited Vista to one ReadyBoost per machine Q: Why just one device? A: Time and quality. Since this is the first revision of the feature, we decided to focus on making the single device exceptional, without the difficulties of managing multiple caches. We like the idea, though, and it's under consideration for future versions. I also know that the 4GB limit on the cache file was a limitation of the FAT filesystem used on most USB sticks - an SSD drive would be formatted with NTFS: Q: What's the largest amount of flash that I can use for ReadyBoost? A: You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost (which turns out to be 8GB of cache w/ the compression) Q: Why can't I use more than 4GB of flash? A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB Can a ReadyBoost cache on an NTFS volume be larger than 4GB? Update Two The ReadyBoost cache is encrypted with a per-boot session key. This means that the cache has to be re-built after each boot, and cannot be used to help speed boot times, or latency from login to usable. Windows ReadyDrive technology takes advantage of non-volatile (NV) memory (i.e. flash) that is incorporated with some hybrid hard drives. This flash cache can be used to help Windows boot, or resume from hibernate faster. Will Windows 7 use an internal SSD drive as a ReadyBoost/*ReadyDrive*/SuperFetch cache? Is it possible to make Windows store a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost) on a non-removable SSD? Is it possible to not encrypt the ReadyBoost cache, and if so will Windows 7 use the cache at boot time? See also SuperUser.com: ReadyBoost + SSD = ? Windows 7 - ReadyBoost & SSD drives? Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives Using SDD as a cache for HDD, is there a solution? Performance increase using SSD for paging/fetch/cache or ReadyBoost? (Win7) Windows 7 To Boost SSD Performance How to Disable Nonvolatile Caching

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• Intel Rapid Storage / Smart Response SSD caching issue

  - by goober

  Background Recently built my own PC. It works! Almost. It's been a while since getting into the guts of these things, so I'm familiar but may be missing something simple. FYI, I don't care about blowing the OS away -- it's brand new and we can go back from scratch as many times as necessary. Goal / Issue I'd like to use the SSD to take advantage of Intel's Smart Response technology (allows the SSD to act as a cache for HDDs) I would like the SSD cache to act as a cache for my HDDs, which I would like to be in a RAID1 array (so I get the speed from the SSD and the redundancy from the RAID1) However, Windows only sees the drive in device manager (not as a drive), so I'm unsure what to do about that. Related: as far as I know, for this to work, the drives all have to be in a single RAID array (i.e. a RAID0 pairing of the SSD and the RAID1 HDD array). However, when attempting this at the BIOS level, I am told there is not enough space for an array. Steps so Far Moved the SSD onto the Intel controller (I'd had it on the Marvel 6.0 controller instead of the Intel controller, so the BIOS was only seeing it in a strange way) Updated the BIOS of the motherboard to the latest version Reinstalled Intel's RST (iRST?) software several times, as some forums reported it working after reinstalling 3 times (which does not inspire confidence). Checked Intel storage: it does see the SSD as a physical, non-RAID device. However, it says no space exists if I try to create an array. Checked the BIOS: it does not show up in the boot order, but is an option that can be selected under boot options. Tried the firmware update for that model. Issue: the firmware CD doesn't detect a drive; maybe the Intel storage controller is making it difficult? moved the ssd to the marvel controller. The firmware update cd appeared to hang while searching for drives. swapped out the SATA cable for the manufacturer's and moved back to the intel storage controller. Noticed at this point that in the Intel RST software, a device DOES show up in addition to the RAID set -- only shown as a "60 GB internal disk". Windows doesn't appear to see it as a drive, but it does still show in device manager. Move SSD to port from 0-3 on MOBO and set SATA mode to IDE (after disconnecting RAID1 config) to allow the firmware update to work. Firmware was already at the latest version. Next Steps ? Components involved ASUS P8Z68-V PRO motherboard (Intel Z68 Chipset) Intel i7 2600k Processor 2 x 1TB 7200 RPM HDDs 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD (M4-CT064M4SSD2) For Reference -- Storage Configuration Intel 3 gbps Intel 3gbps Intel 6gbps Marvel 6gbps +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ +----------+ | | <----+ | | +-+ | | | |----------| | |----------| |-|--------| |----------| | | | | + | | | | | | +----------+ | +--|-------+ +-|--------+ +----------+ | | | + v v | 1 TB HDD 64 GB SSD + +> 1 TB HDD For Reference -- Intel RST (v10.8.0.1003) Screenshot Don't mind the "rebuilding" -- knocked a power cable out at one point; it's doing its job, not an indicator of a bad HDD. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance for any help!

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• Performance issues when using SSD for a developer notebook (WAMP/LAMP stack)?

  - by András Szepesházi

  I'm a web application developer using my notebook as a standalone development environment (WAMP stack). I just switched from a Core2-duo Vista 32 bit notebook with 2Gb RAM and SATA HDD, to an i5-2520M Win7 64 bit with 4Gb RAM and 128 GB SDD (Corsair P3 128). My initial experience was what I expected, fast boot, quick load of all the applications (Eclipse takes now 5 seconds as opposed to 30s on my old notebook), overall great experience. Then I started to build up my development stack, both as LAMP (using VirtualBox with a debian guest) and WAMP (windows native apache + mysql + php). I wanted to compare those two. This still all worked great out, then I started to pull in my projects to these stacks. And here came the nasty surprise, one of those projects produced a lot worse response times than on my old notebook (that was true for both the VirtualBox and WAMP stack). Apache, php and mysql configurations were practically identical in all environments. I started to do a lot of benchmarking and profiling, and here is what I've found: All general benchmarks (Performance Test 7.0, HDTune Pro, wPrime2 and some more) gave a big advantage to the new notebook. Nothing surprising here. Disc specific tests showed that read/write operations peaked around 380M/160M for the SSD, and all the different sized block operations also performed very well. Started apache performance benchmarking with Apache Benchmark for a small static html file (10 concurrent threads, 500 iterations). Old notebook: min 47ms, median 111ms, max 156ms New WAMP stack: min 71ms, median 135ms, max 296ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 6ms, median 46ms, max 175ms Right here I don't get why the native WAMP stack performed so bad, but at least the LAMP environment brought the expected speed. Apache performance measurement for non-cached php content. The php runs a loop of 1000 and generates sha1(uniqid()) inisde. Again, 10 concurrent threads, 500 iterations were used for the benchmark. Old notebook: min 0ms, median 39ms, max 218ms New WAMP stack: min 20ms, median 61ms, max 186ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 124ms, median 704ms, max 2463ms What the hell? The new LAMP performed miserably, and even the new native WAMP was outperformed by the old notebook. php + mysql test. The test consists of connecting to a database and reading a single record form a table using INNER JOIN on 3 more (indexed) tables, repeated 100 times within a loop. Databases were identical. 10 concurrent threads, 100 iterations were used for the benchmark. Old notebook: min 1201ms, median 1734ms, max 3728ms New WAMP stack: min 367ms, median 675ms, max 1893ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 1410ms, median 3659ms, max 5045ms And the same test with concurrency set to 1 (instead of 10): Old notebook: min 1201ms, median 1261ms, max 1357ms New WAMP stack: min 399ms, median 483ms, max 539ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 285ms, median 348ms, max 444ms Strictly for my purposes, as I'm using a self contained development environment (= low concurrency) I could be satisfied with the second test's result. Though I have no idea why the VirtualBox environment performed so bad with higher concurrency. Finally I performed a test of including many php files. The application that I mentioned at the beginning, the one that was performing so bad, has a heavy bootstrap, loads hundreds of small library and configuration files while initializing. So this test does nothing else just includes about 100 files. Concurrency set to 1, 100 iterations: Old notebook: min 140ms, median 168ms, max 406ms New WAMP stack: min 434ms, median 488ms, max 604ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 413ms, median 1040ms, max 1921ms Even if I consider that VirtualBox reached those files via shared folders, and that slows things down a bit, I still don't see how could the old notebook outperform so heavily both new configurations. And I think this is the real root of the slow performance, as the application uses even more includes, and the whole bootstrap will occur several times within a page request (for each ajax call, for example). To sum it up, here I am with a brand new high-performance notebook that loads the same page in 20 seconds, that my old notebook can do in 5-7 seconds. Needless to say, I'm not a very happy person right now. Why do you think I experience these poor performance values? What are my options to remedy this situation?

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• How to place SuperFetch cache on an SSD?

  - by Ian Boyd

  I'm thinking of adding a solid state drive (SSD) to my existing Windows 7 installation. I know I can (and should) move my paging file to the SSD: Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs? Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size. In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD. What I don't know is if I even can put a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost cache) on the solid state drive. I want to get the benefit of Windows being able to cache gigabytes of frequently accessed data on a relativly small (e.g. 30GB) solid state drive. This is exactly what SuperFetch+ReadyBoost (or SuperFetch+ReadyDrive) was designed for. Will Windows offer (or let) me place a ReadyBoost cache on a solid state flash drive connected via SATA? A problem with the ReadyBoost cache over the ReadyDrive cache is that the ReadyBoost cache does not survive between reboots. The cache is encrypted with a per-session key, making its existing contents unusable during boot and SuperFetch pre-fetching during login. Update One I know that Windows Vista limited you to only one ReadyBoost.sfcache file (I do not know if Windows 7 removed that limitation): Q: Can use use multiple devices for EMDs? A: Nope. We've limited Vista to one ReadyBoost per machine Q: Why just one device? A: Time and quality. Since this is the first revision of the feature, we decided to focus on making the single device exceptional, without the difficulties of managing multiple caches. We like the idea, though, and it's under consideration for future versions. I also know that the 4GB limit on the cache file was a limitation of the FAT filesystem used on most USB sticks - an SSD drive would be formatted with NTFS: Q: What's the largest amount of flash that I can use for ReadyBoost? A: You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost (which turns out to be 8GB of cache w/ the compression) Q: Why can't I use more than 4GB of flash? A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB Can a ReadyBoost cache on an NTFS volume be larger than 4GB? Update Two The ReadyBoost cache is encrypted with a per-boot session key. This means that the cache has to be re-built after each boot, and cannot be used to help speed boot times, or latency from login to usable. Windows ReadyDrive technology takes advantage of non-volatile (NV) memory (i.e. flash) that is incorporated with some hybrid hard drives. This flash cache can be used to help Windows boot, or resume from hibernate faster. Will Windows 7 use an internal SSD drive as a ReadyBoost/*ReadyDrive*/SuperFetch cache? Is it possible to make Windows store a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost) on a non-removable SSD? Is it possible to not encrypt the ReadyBoost cache, and if so will Windows 7 use the cache at boot time? See also SuperUser.com: ReadyBoost + SSD = ? Windows 7 - ReadyBoost & SSD drives? Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives Using SDD as a cache for HDD, is there a solution? Performance increase using SSD for paging/fetch/cache or ReadyBoost? (Win7) Windows 7 To Boost SSD Performance How to Disable Nonvolatile Caching

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• Choice of an OS for a home ZFS NAS

  - by OlafM

  I am preparing a home NAS with an old Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4 GB ECC RAM, Asus M2V MX motherboard, and a single 3 TB WDC Green (another one as mirror may be installed in the future). It's the cheapest solution I found that includes ECC memory and the higher energy consumption is offset by the lower (zero) cost of acquisition. The system will be used for: music storage and stream to other desktop computers; storage of the scanned dia slides (3-4k slides, 180 MB TIFF each one plus reduced quality JPEG version); stream of these photos to a local iPad 2 (maybe Plex App? not yet sure); (one additional) remote backup via rsync/ssh or ZFS send/receive. It will be controlled via remote ssh, maybe VNC, no monitor attached. Absolute requirement is a reliable ZFS solution, plus the ability to easily install packets/software/virtual machines and to update remotely (I will be the admin and I don't live near the NAS). I have mainly three options: NAS4free/FreeNAS OpenIndiana Solaris Express 11 (yeah yeah I know the license requirements, I will write a perl script on it to count it as development machine). Problems: NAS4free/FreeNAS (I tested only NAS4free) required embedded installation for remote upgrading, but full install for easy addition of software packets. Since I need at least AirVideo Server (linux/win) and Plex App (win/linux) to stream the photos and some videos to iPad (they both require virtualbox), but I cannot be there to install updates, NAS4free/FreeNAS are excluded. http://www.nas4free.org/general_information.html explains the issue: embedded can be remotely updated, full cannot. Solaris has also another advantage: Crashplan client supports Solaris and I'm already using it for other backups. I would like to leave the option open, even if I will be doing backups probably through zfs send/receive. NexentaStor was left out because zfs send/receive are not included in the free version. The question is now Solaris 11 Express over OpenIndiana. To ease the management, I will be using http://www.napp-it.org Which one would you suggest and why? I found lots of informations and it's difficult for me to decide. I think (from the napp-it manual) that Solaris has some additional options for SMB shares, but are they really needed at home? I think I won't even use ACLs, since normal unix-style permissions are enough. OpenIndiana has maybe more frequent updates (Solaris offers only security updates between releases), but again, do I need them? I don't think so. Moreover, this is a NAS that has to work and nothing else, I cannot risk having problems that require me to access the server. Isn't OpenIndiana a bit more... cutting edge (in the Solaris world)? I'm just asking, no need to focus on this for the answer :-) I would limit myself to these two options (SE11.1/OI) also because I will be making a NAS for me in the future (where high performances with Mac shares are also required) and Solaris has kernel support for AFP. I will use this server to gather experience as well. After this long question, thanks in advance! If you need additional info, let me know and I will update this post.

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