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Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:47:51 -0000

John,

Are you having trouble tailoring the example code I provided to your domain? What are you trying to accomplish?

Re: Be Language Agnostic - Solve the Problem!

Matt Reiferson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:48:50 -0000

Orestis,

I would be interested in reading more about that if you can find a link.

Truth be told it was the first time I had heard about it. I can't speak much for its validity with respect to human language but, I agree, it makes a lot of sense in the realm of computer programming languages.

Thanks,

-Matt

Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:55:47 -0000

Way,

I believe this has to do with PHP Sessions using the default "files" save_handler. In order to prevent race conditions with data inside the $_SESSION variable PHP locks the file its storing the data in. A second request that tries to initiate a session tries to access this same file and waits for it to become available.

If you use a custom session save_handler (like memcache or your database) and implement variable level locking (instead of session level locking) you can circumvent this problem.

Perhaps this is a good blog post, I'll write something up.

Thanks,

-Matt

Re: Be Language Agnostic - Solve the Problem!

Matt Reiferson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:13:11 -0000

Olivier,

I'm confused as to what exactly you disagree with. You're making the same points as the post... ie use the language with the features/performance/etc. required for the job.

Am I missing something?

-Matt

Re: Be Language Agnostic - Solve the Problem!

Matt Reiferson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:41:31 -0000

Thanks for your feedback. I agree with your points with regards to the line you quoted. In hindsight it doesn't jive with the rest of the points I'm making in that paragraph.

With respect to Sapir-whorf. My understanding is that what it suggests is fundamentally different than the point you're making. It supposes that a language affects how you think.

This does make sense to me. Take Python - you think "pythonic". A functional programming language would encourage you to think functionally. C encourages you to think procedurally. Etc.

Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:09:20 -0000

Dave,

No, using FastCGI as an interface for PHP and Apache wouldn't help. It's Apache itself thats the problem. It isn't a web server meant for a high-volume of simultaneously open connections.

It isn't that difficult to get up and running with lighttpd on a cPanel box.

-Matt

Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:16:40 -0000

Dave,

I think you're thinking about this wrong. You don't need FastCGI in order to scale an app that uses this technique. FastCGI just happens to be a common interface of servers that are able to scale with an app using this technique.

Lighttpd would be my suggested choice given that it's easy to get PHP up and running on it and is fairly easy to install.

-Matt

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:17:26 -0000

Thanks for pointing that out, I'll update the post.

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:20:04 -0000

Thanks Jake. As usually is the case it's fantastic for a large number of scenarios but, as you dig deeper and need to finely tune things, you begin to identify potential areas for improvement.

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:57:29 -0000

Interesting, thanks.

I suppose using the 2nd method you proposed, count(), would be ideal for performance/memory reasons because you're not transferring the result-set from the database.

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:20:07 -0000

John, this is exactly in line with what I'd like to be able to accomplish. I like where you're going with this.

Perhaps splitting on something other than a space?

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:21:17 -0000

I looked up the 'attrs' documentation, which is sparse. I don't think it's the responsibility of the view or the Form definition to define template related attributes like style, size, etc. I think these attributes should elegantly be modified within the template.

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:06:13 -0000

DISQUS supports some html, apparently not PRE :(

Re: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

Matt Reiferson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:46:40 -0000

You have to define those attributes somewhere. It makes more sense (to me) to do that within the template than in your form definition or in your view.

Even if you ultimately style the attributes using CSS you have to specify that class somewhere. I'd like to able to easily do that from within the template.

Re: Getting Started with Django and Python – First Impressions

Matt Reiferson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:04:01 -0000

Joe,

Thanks for your comment.

views.py can go in your project root (if you have project specific views) and it can go in any apps directory (where __init__.py is) that you have in your installed apps setting.

Check your apache error_log to see why Django is crashing when you have Debug = false.

Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:11:55 -0000

have you tried enabling script debugging to see what line of code is causing the problem?

Re: PHP jQuery AJAX Javascript Long Polling

Matt Reiferson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:26:01 -0000

A couple things.

You should move your memcache connection line outside the while loop - you don't want to reconnect every iteration.

$data, the way you have it written, can never be empty so the loop will always only run one iteration.

If there are no script errors being reported, is an empty alert box being displayed?

Re: Database Read/Write Splitting in Frameworks/ORMs

Matt Reiferson — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:14:57 -0000

While I see the point you're raising I think it's interesting to keep in mind the ol' 80/20 rule. A web framework is trying to solve 80% of the problems for you.

They get you *most* of the way there, quickly. When you're hitting scalability issues it might be time to break out of the confines of an ORM anyway, whether or not you've encountered this particular issue.

Re: PHP Forking to Concurrency with pcntl_fork()

Matt Reiferson — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:10:11 -0000

Basically, you want the child to exit without cleaning up.

Thanks for the comment!

Re: Python libwkhtmltox module – wrapping a C library using Cython – convert HTML to PDF

Matt Reiferson — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 10:56:21 -0000

thanks! it's definitely powerful to be able to have the option (without changing markup, css, or even javascript powered views) to produce a high-quality PDF or image.

was really happy that Cython was so easy to work with.

let me know if you find any issues...

Re: Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

Matt Reiferson — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:52:13 -0000

I guess it would be possible to provide a binary distribution for common platforms and, depending on the version of PHP you're running (ie < 5.3) you could use the dl() function to dynamically introduce the extension. The shared hosting environment might have disabled that too, though.

Re: Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:09:49 -0000

James, have you run ldconfig?

Re: Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:33:53 -0000

Sure you have the libs for the right architecture you're trying to build the extension for?

Re: Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

Matt Reiferson — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:06:53 -0000

Hey James I've updated the config.m4 file that phpize uses to generate the configure script. Can you:

$ git pull origin master
$ phpize --clean
$ phpize
$ ./configure

And if it isn't working paste the entire output of the configure script?

Re: Convert HTML to PDF in PHP (libwkhtmltox extension)

Matt Reiferson — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:34:54 -0000

and how about the full output of:

$ ldconfig -v