Trevor May.ca

The Hobbit High Frame Rate

Canadaka — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:36:53 +0000

So yah, high frame rate… I want to like new things, in theory it sounds good and 24gps film is an outdated standard from almost 100 years ago, but…. Not sure I like it. I definitely get what a lot of reviews say that it looks like a video game or watching a live play. The scenes with CG, lots of light and a moving camera look fake, lots of movements look sped up, specially close-ups in brightly lit scenes. The first 10min all looked very strange, but after that you start to get used to it. Then there will be a scene that is kinda jarring that reminds you. It defiantly works better with dark low light scenes. It also helps a lot with the 3D, no blurriness, no eye strain and everything is SUPER crisp, maybe too much so at times.

I have to go see the movie again in normal 24fps non-3D to compare. I suspect I will enjoy it more the old-school way

Drupal Performance on IIS7 vs Apache

Canadaka — Wed, 30 May 2012 10:33:51 +0000

I’ve been doing a bunch of performance testing for one of my Drupal sites Trailforks.com and decided to compare IIS7 vs Apache 2.4. I host several Drupal websites on Windows Web Server 2008 with IIS7 and love it. I’ve read more and more articles that show IIS outperforms Apache and other web servers in many situations. But I wanted to make sure I wasn’t loosing possible performance by hosting my site with IIS compared to Apache.

I created a local copy of my site and database on my desktop which is an Intel Core i7 920 OC@ 3.3Ghz with 6GB ram and an SSD. I installed the following software: IIS7, MySQL 5.5, PHP 5.3.13 & Apache 2.4. For IIS I also installed Microsofts URL Rewrite plugin. Besides that the IIS7 configuration is default. PHP settings are default besides upping the memory_limit to 256MB. For my first tests I also left Apache with its default config.

I used Microsoft’s cool testing tool called WCAT. My tests were to see how many pages each server could load in a 20 second period, with a 5 second warmup. The following is my wcat .ubr settings

[Configuration]
WarmupTime 5s
NumClientMachines 1
MaxRecvBuffer 64K
CooldownTime 5s
ThinkTime 0s
NumClientThreads 80
Duration 20s
Comment Test Server

[Script]
SET KeepAlive = TRUE

NEW TRANSACTION
classId = 1
weight = 100
server = “localhost”
NEW REQUEST HTTP
URL = “http://trailforks.local/”

For the Drupal side, I tested my Trailforks site which contains over 100 modules & a custom theme. I created a blank page with a blank template using a custom module, so its the most basic drupal page. I disabled drupals cache and the Boost module cache. These are the initial results.

IIS – 192
Apache – 53

I was rather surprised with the results, IIS blew Apache out of the water. The next test was to enable boost and test serving basically just a simple html file.

IIS – 207,677
Apache – 84,436

Again IIS more than doubles Apache’s numbers. I also tried with IIS’s built-in “Output Caching” and the result was prety close to Boost at 219,374. Now another advantage to IIS is that the default configuation of IIS7 and of PHP 5.3 when using the PHP Installer is pretty good, I wouldn’t change much. Its been several years since I had used Apache, but I knew that the default Apache config is not great. So I did a bit of looking around and added a couple things to the httpd.conf along with disabling all but the minimum Apache modules needed to run Drupal.

KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 150
KeepAliveTimeout 5

ThreadsPerChild 250
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

This increased the Apache number only slightly from 53 to 62.

I also wanted to test each platforms most popular PHP Opcode cache extension, Wincache & APC. I installed the newest version for each and gave both lots of memory (same amount for both).

IIS – 683
Apache – 544

So once again IIS with Wincache beats out Apache with APC. Also nice to see that the opcode more than triples the performance!

Another quick test was to enable a “web garden” on the IIS application pool for the site. Changed the max worker process to 10. this increased the IIS number even further to 936.

Doing these tests has defiantly reaffirmed my choice to use Windows & IIS for hosting my sites. Not only does it outperform Apache in these specific tests but I find it MUCH easier to manage with the excellent UI’s and tools. Ever since Microsoft moved the HTTP.sys into the Windows kernal and rewrote IIS from 6 to 7, its been a solid competitive option. With Windows you also don’t have to worry about tweaking TCP like you have to on most Linus distros for optimal web hosting performance. Microsoft has also invested a lot into PHP & FastCGI on Windows over the past several years and PHP on Windows/IIS is just as good as LAMP now. One of my favourite things about IIS is “application pools” and how each site is isolated from everything else, so if it crashes, or is running slow, it doesn’t effect the others. This also helps for security and application pools can be configured to recycle when it detects problems. Another huge bonus is most config changes you make with the IIS Admin GUI or by hand editing a web.config file take effect instantly! No restarting Apache every time you change a setting.

I know doing any kind of benchmarks is never perfect and I want to do more tests. I’m planning on running more tests with a higher concurrent to see if that changes the comparative results at all. Additionaly if anyone has any suggestions on how Apache might be better tweaked please let me know!

Easy WCAT setup I created with simple .BAT files to run creating the server & client for testing: wcat_setup.zip

How Politwitter Works

Canadaka — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:23:56 +0000

A new blog post on Politwitter detailing some of the background mechanisms that make Politwitter.ca tick. http://politwitter.ca/blog/26/how-politwitter-works

Politwitter Launches Government Social Media Aggregator

Canadaka — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:24:34 +0000

gov.politwitter.ca is a companion tool to Politwitter that tracks social media activity by Canadian government departments, institutions & organizations.

Many of the features, & statistic tracking from Politwitter is now available to help track & analyze how the Canadian government is using social media and how citizens are interacting with it.

Back in 2009 after launching Politwitter.ca I thought about creating sub-sites for local government, newsmedia & government. In 2009 I started creating newstweets.ca but soon realised there was not much interest. I created local.politwitter.ca to start collecting municipal twitter data, but also realised I didn’t have the time to maintain a database of all the municipalities in Canada. Keeping Politwitter going with federal & provincial politics is already a big undertaking.

I started on a Government site but with federal & provincial elections on the go I was focused on Politwitter.ca. Well in March 2012 a new site zegov.ca created a directory of Government Twitter & Facebook accounts so it reminded & prompted me to finish the Politwitter GOV site. Keeping a directory of Governments social media is manageable, the numbers aren’t huge. But as with the main Politwitter site the directory can be updated by anyone.

Politwitter not only lists government Twitter & Facebook accounts but also includes Youtube, Flickr & indexing of photos & links. Politwitter also aggregates all of this government social media data for permanent archival and analysis, with features & tools people have loved on the Politwitter political side.

Politwitter allows sorting, filtering, searching and statistics of the Government social media. More statistics will become available once more data is collected.

I don’t mean to step on Zegov’s toes, but I’ve had this on the backburner for 2 years and already had all the infrastructure built for Politwitter. Using the Politwiter platform gives much more functionality than exists on the Zegov website. I’ve also seen several projects like these popup over the years that fizzle out or aren’t maintained. Politwitter has a proven track record which media, politicians and government already rely on. I can also share data between the government & political sites for deeper analysis going forward.

I’m always open to working with others or having people help develop Politwitter, but for the most part no one takes me up on that offer and it’s been a solo undertaking. Of course if you’re not a web developer you can always help by keeping the directory updated, telling others about Politwitter or donating.

If you have any suggestions for the new Government Politwitter let me know! If you see a government twitter account missing you can add it here.

gov.politwitter.ca

Trailforks

Canadaka — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:41:18 +0000

Finally pulling the wraps off a project I’ve been working on called Trailforks.www.trailforks.com is a community-powered mountain biking trail database currently focused on BC.

The core functionality of Trailforks is a database for mountain biking trails. Trailforks is a crowd-sourced community site and users can help populate and keep the database updated. The data & features for each trail is tailed specifically for mountain biking. There is a high focus on getting GPS data for every trail & maps are a big part of the site. Each trail page has a map and GPS data and each riding area has a Google Earth 3D map with all the trails plotted on it dynamically. Just upload a GPS track of a single trail and all the rest is handled automatically. (Example the Mount Fromme Page)

The site has loads of other features like photos, videos, skill parks, news, business directory, local products, events, forums, bike profiles, riding routes, route challenges, group ride planning & more. But one feature I really want to promote is “Trail Reports”. A Trail Report is a quick entry posted by users indicating the status of a trail and describing any problems or things needing attention on a trail. A trail report can also be a log of work done on a trail and “trail days”. I hope that local riding associations and trail maintainers might start using this tool. Most pages on the site offer RSS feeds and I can create custom widgets for associations so they can display trail status and reports on their own sites. I also have a REST API that accepts and outputs data in XML, JSON or Serialized PHP.

To help encourage people to build the database users earn points for all the content they contribute and credit is given to the user. The site also has points & gaming style achievements that users can unlock by helping contribute content or just by using the site. For example one of the achievements is “Ridden 100 Trails” earned by marking 100 trails as “ridden”.

Trailforks now also integrates with my “Ridelog” Facebook App.