Using Atom 330 for server applications

Recently I've tried to bring some attention to Atom-based servers for private web-hosting. There were many skeptical about this idea: "How can cheap netbook processor work in a server?". Now some companies provide collocation for atom-based nettops for a reduced price (~30$, usual price for 1U server is around 100$), and I wanted to share my experiences after using such server for a month.

Server configuration: Acer Aspire Revo 3600 on nVidia Ion platform, Intel Atom 330 (2 physical cores, 64-bit), 4Gb DDR2-800 RAM (Ubuntu 64 managed to see just 3.2Gb, looks like BIOS issue), SSD OCZ Vertex 30Gb. I had several SSD optimizations applied: noatime mount, disabled access-logs, disabled swap – all this to extend drive life, but this is a topic for a separate article. BTW, during first month of usage I’ve spent around 0.5% of the drive resource.

My experiences of Google AppEngine usage

Warning! This article was written in the first months of Google AppEngine. Today it is completely obsolete.

Disclaimer: This article is not about "I am so clever, Google is so stupid". This article is about some Google AppEngine problems (or peculiarities) which might not be obvious for newcomers.

You know, Google did really nice things: great search, and awesome mail. It gets a lot of valuable private information about our habits through that, but we continue to use these things because they are so awesome at solving their task...

There was some hype about AppEngine lately, so I’ve decided to give it a try in my new project.
I’ve chosen Python with Google’s native libraries to ensure best compatibility & performance.
I’ve started from the performance tests, and the results were…. Disappointing:

Test description	Hits per second
print 'Hello world'	260
1 read from Datastore, 1 write to Datastore	38
1 read from Datastore	60
10 reads from Datastore, 1 write	20
1 read from memcached, 1 write to memcached	80
1 read from memcached	120
Non-google complete PHP application, 6 SQL queries, http://3.14.by/	240

MR party at Bobruisk

Once Upon A Time, we've decided to celebrate release of the new version of software that we were developing: Knova 6.6. Our team was 6 developers (boys ) and 3 testers (girls ). As a party place we selected the shore of Beresina river near the legendary Belarusian city Bobruisk. We selected this place because it's at the middle between Gomel (Developers were from Gomel) and Minsk (Testers were from Minsk). Also, the nature is beautiful there.
You can read about these places in classic Russian literature - "The Golden Calf" (Zolotoi telenok) written in 1931 by Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov. Here is the extract:

"How's that? All of the plateau?" Balaganov taunted.
And why not add Melitopol, or perhaps Bobruisk?

At the mention of Bobruisk the entire convention moaned painfully. Everybody was ready to go to Bobruisk immediately. Bobruisk was considered a splendid, highly cultured place

Passive cooling of NForce 4

Recently I've upgraded to AMD 939 Sempron system. Everything was excellent, except noise. I've replaced CPU cooler to Thermaltake Sonic tower (excellent cooler for not-very-hot CPUs like Sempron). But the main source of noise was chipset cooler. It was small and extremely noisy.

So, I’ve decided to make a new cooler from old 939 one. Of course it’s too big to be set on chipset. So I’ve sawed it on 2 parts. Then I’ve glued this radiator instead the old one.

USA-2006

That was my second visit to the USA. This time it was again at Silicon Valley, California.

We’ve lived and worked at Cupertino city for 5 weeks. At the weekends we usually visited some interesting places like national parks, ocean, shops . So, here is some photos about this trip: