Puckdropper
You can never beat data locality.
Tue Jul 04, 2023 3:02am

I have to wonder, can a server in France talking to one in the US beat something speedyish, like a 30 year-old computer with a hard drive? That's probably a 386, so not too shabby.

  • The Koyeb hosted Perl site is super slow. The size of the VM only has 128MB of RAM. Also, it's hosted in France and the database is located in the US so EVERY single DB transaction goes across the Atlantic ocean which takes some time. From the logs, it looks like almost all of those 6 seconds were... more
    • You can never beat data locality.- Puckdropper, Tue Jul 04 2023 3:02am
      • More like a Pentium! - Erik_, Wed Jul 05 2023 2:39am
        According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium ) it was released on 03/22/1993. (I was thinking 486 myself) My laptop that I write all this on is about 10 years old and runs everything locally at or better than Heroku does. So the France server might actually be as slow as something... more
        • Ok, Pentium Era - Puckdropper, Wed Jul 05 2023 4:22pm
          Socket 5. I still have an old NEC Ready 7022 around here somewhere, I upgraded it from a 75 mHz CPU to it's max speed of 100 mHz. Now you can buy Arduino-style microprocessors that run faster. Sometimes the age doesn't really make too much difference. The NVIDIA hybrid chip in this laptop is faster... more
    • That's a crazy difference. No wonder I was driving myself insane trying to get the Koyeb version to not be so slow. It's incredibly slow in comparison! Test was measured using the Firefox dev tools Network tab. Both posts measured are the ones below this one. So replying to the same exact message.... more
      • Why is my site running so slowly? - Puckdropper, Tue Jul 04 2023 3:00am
        Oh, because it is slow. 6 seconds, that's dial-up time.
        • You're not kidding! - Erik_, Tue Aug 01 2023 4:27pm
          I have ethernet plugged into my 486 and it takes about 10s or so before the page is usable on both the Java and Perl sites. Close to 15-20s before it finishes loading. The images are over https so they end up causing the browser to spin and eventually fail to load them which also hurts the loading times.... more
    • *Koyeb post test - Erik_, Fri Jun 30 2023 10:42pm
      Postinggggggggggggggggggggg
      • How much time did you waste typing the g's? (nm) - Puckdropper, Tue Jul 04 2023 2:58am
        • I was originally going to delete those test posts but decided to just leave them.
          • Wait, you're testing in production? - Puckdropper, Wed Jul 05 2023 4:24pm
            Don't you have a test forum or something? Shame Shame, everyone knows your name because it's on your post.
            • Not usually but... - Erik_, Wed Jul 05 2023 11:23pm
              It's a case of 'It works on my machine!'. :D Who am I kidding... yes there's definitely some things that go out the door that probably should have more testing before doing so. The nice thing about how things are set up, it's very easy to revert deployments to the previous version or quickly deploy... more
              • I definitely get, Well it's done. I can't see what could be - Puckdropper, Mon Jul 17 2023 3:40pm
                wrong. Let's go! I think humans tend to be right just enough times to keep falling into the trap. :-)
                • Just did a prod test now... - Erik_, Sat Jul 22 2023 1:05pm
                  Didn't work out so great. I added a feature that on certain email bounce error codes, it will auto unsubscribe that email address to avoid future sending. Well, I goofed setting some email headers and caused a bounce to my own address which auto unsubscribed me from everything. Looks like I missed... more
                  • If you didn't want emails, it worked great! - Puckdropper, Mon Jul 24 2023 6:38pm
                    Some receiving mail servers report to the sending server that a message was marked as spam. Groups.io receives these messages and unsubscribes your e-mail address. It gets to be annoying when it's done incorrectly. (I've had to fish a few groups.io digests out of the spam bucket.) Is that basically... more
                    • Yes, more or less.. though it's off right now. - Erik_, Tue Jul 25 2023 12:24am
                      I'll probably try turning it back on in a few days. I wanted to make sure that the email headers fix I put in was working 100% before I turned back on the auto-unsubscribing. (So far, no issues) Below are the rough steps that trigger an auto-unsubscribe. If any step fails, no action is taken, just the... more
                      • I hadn't realized that things had gone so far - Puckdropper, Sat Aug 05 2023 4:06am
                        I remember hearing about domain keys when it first came out. Guess that's why my e-mail doesn't see as much spam as it used to, even though my address is posted publicly on Usenet. (Or is it just Usenet's dying out? Sad to see it go.)
                        • Yeah it's crazy now but also a good thing. - Erik_, Sun Aug 06 2023 4:05pm
                          It makes it sort of a pain as the person sending the emails but makes the quality of life of the recipients so much better than it was back in the day. I wonder how many more layers they can plop on over the coming years or if something will finally replace email. (Thinking probably not... Sort of like... more
                          • What they like about e-mail is it's insecure - Puckdropper, Mon Aug 07 2023 3:50pm
                            The average person doesn't know that, but it's really just a post card. Intended for recipient only, but not private. It makes it very easy to eavesdrop on it. Secure messages are things like Whatsapp. Will IM programs ever replace e-mail? Well, they've made e-mail look a lot like IM programs....... more
                            • Didn't even think of that - Erik_, Tue Aug 08 2023 8:32am
                              But it makes sense. The sending and receiving parties have to read the email in order to process them. You can base64 encode the body but that's trivial to reverse. (IIRC the types of transfer encoding were 7bit, 8bit, base64, printable and binary or something) I guess that's how messages with too much... more
                              • The "envelope" portion will always be world readable - Puckdropper, Mon Aug 14 2023 5:58am
                                It's just how it's got to work. The body could easily be encrypted, but it needs to be seamless. PGP never really took off, unfortunately. Sometimes I think it's a useful thought exercise to pretend an email costs the same as postage stamp. Do you really need to spend that money to just tick off... more
                                • I wonder how much an email does cost? - Erik_, Tue Aug 15 2023 1:05am
                                  It's using server resources on every hop it makes to the final mail server. It's probably a fraction of a fraction of a cent from end to end but the sheer amount of unsolicited spam emails that get generated and sent around must cost a somewhat substantial amount of money overall. I had that issue only... more
                                  • Good question... Probably what you're thinking. - Puckdropper, Fri Aug 25 2023 6:05am
                                    I'm sure somewhere you can find stats on how much stuff is on the Internet backbones that no one actually wants. Spam, the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipie that's been forwarded 35 times without being cleaned up, etc. It's actually quite a bit. It could be that it's an exchange server... Yahoo! and... more
                                    • Yeah, it's definitely an Exchange server - Erik_, Wed Aug 30 2023 9:54am
                                      It's just been so long since I've done IT/SRE work besides just development that I wasn't sure if maybe MIcrosoft had their own spam filter that they do on top of whatever your local Exchange server has set up. I guess thinking about it now, that would probably annoy a bunch of IT workers who are wondering... more
                                      • So now we know--email sending is cheap (like stealing) - Puckdropper, Wed Aug 30 2023 5:09pm
                                        and the receivers waste around $.95/message (like those being stolen from) and the only real solution is filtering (like theft prevention) but that takes resources (like buying locks does) and everyone except the spammers (thieves) would be happier without it. I really didn't expect the analogy to... more
"Forces act when not restrained" - Puckdropper