Month: December 2004

iTunes Music Store: user-friendly, as I’d expect

I purchased some tracks for my annual holiday mix and in the midst of downloading, iTunes crashed. <grumble>

I hunted around and found the files representing the tracks: all zero-length — empty — files. And I got a receipt for the purchase so iTunes thought it had delivered them. So I took a look at the iTunes pages at Apple.com and found that iTunes is able to verify if files got downloaded and if not, complete the delivery.

Apple – Support – iTunes Music Store Customer Service:

About Interrupted Downloads

iTunes includes several innovative features to ensure that your download will restart the next time you open iTunes-even after a power outage. To find purchased music in iTunes, select Check for Purchased Music under the Advanced menu.

More about interrupted downloads

Very nice. Now I can get back to playing with this mix . . .

Now playing: Coventry Carol by Suzanne Vega from the album “Celebrate the Season”

OS X and memory

Somewhat disappointing: my iBook still swaps even with 640 Mb of RAM. It’s a lot less noticeable, ie, no spinning beach ball of death every so often.

Swap

I also gave up on FireFox today after one too many times of 100% CPU utilization and no recourse but



white:~ paul$ killall firefox-bin

We’ll see how Safari feels after a long absence.

wringing some performance out of old hardware

Bart’s Soapbox – A Geeklog server on FreeBSD:

To get more performance out of PHP, there are a few ways to go.


Install pear and pear-APC

Install Turck-mmcache

Install a Zend cache

I get by far the best results by installing the somewhat experimental Turck-mmcache package instead of the commercial Zend-cache, and it seems to do its job very well.

Pear and APC caused some trouble for Apache and it wouldn’t shutdown properly, instead going in an infinite loop somewhere.

To install it on FreeBSD:

cd /usr/ports/www/turck-mmcache

make install

And follow the instructions at the end of the installation to update your php.ini file.

This seems to a quick and easy fix: this machine got swamped by a comment spam attack last night and even with 128 Mb of RAM dedicated to php, it still had issues. While I shop for more RAM, this seems to speed things up a bit.

graphing http traffic

I decided to plot my http server’s hits and errors in my mrtg graphing pages.

Hitrate

Given the trivial traffic I do (2500 – 4000 hits a day, even excluding all css files, images, and various MSFT exploit attempts), it’s not too difficult. It was simple enough for me to refactor it so I could track error rates as well. All I do is grab the 100 most recent lines of log file, pull out the date of the first and last, work out the seconds between, and calculate how many hits per minute that represents. Pulling the date from the logfile lines took more time than anything, but I am a bear of very little brain when it comes to regular expressions.

I’m sure some smarter person can come up with a Better Way . . . I’ll look for it in the comments.

If that’s too hard to read, you can get a copy here.

and the mrtg config looks like this:

Target[red-httpd]: `/usr/home/paul/bin/hitrate.pl`
MaxBytes[red-httpd]: 1000
AbsMax[red-httpd]: 1000000
Title[red-httpd]: httpd hits and errors
PageTop[red-httpd]: <h1>httpd hits and errors</h1>

Unscaled[red-httpd]: ymw
ShortLegend[red-httpd]: hits/minute
#kMG[red-httpd]:k
YLegend[red-httpd]: hits and errors
Legend1[red-httpd]: hits
Legend2[red-httpd]: errors
Legend3[red-httpd]: hits
Legend4[red-httpd]: errors
LegendI[red-httpd]: hits
LegendO[red-httpd]: errors
Options[red-httpd]: growright,gauge,nopercent

about this Mac

I added 384 Mb RAM to this little gem tonight (replacing a 128 with a 512) and so far things are zippier.

About This Mac

I was really getting frustrated with the boggy slowdowns after a couple of days or a week or uptime as I opened more and more applications. Even logging out wouldn’t solve it, and rebooting was a temporary fix. For US$100, I was able to, I hope, solve the problem. Only time and a vigilant watch on my swap files will tell.



white:/var/vm paul$ ls -l /var/vm

total 131072

drwx–x–x 18 root wheel 612 26 Nov 09:09 app_profile

-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 1 Dec 20:22 swapfile0

An easy fix, too: pop off the keyboard and the instructions are right in front of you.