beer planet

Updated: November 11th, 2008

Updated: July 15th, 2006

Edit: updated link.

Rendr is a live CSS and HTML rendering tool. It displays what the page would look like as you type, making it great for rapid testing of page designs. Just paste some HTML and CSS and the page will change on the fly. The edit box is also movable and resizable.

Updated: July 15th, 2006

Well, the site is fast again (as fast as it can get on Dreamhost). As many Dreamhost users know, sites hosted with them are often slow to load with a high initial lag. I'm hosting 3 sites with them, and there are speed problems with all 3.

So after looking into it some more, I discovered that the problem is not the servers used (they are actually dual core 2+Ghz Opterons), and not the amount of RAM (4GB), or server load (usually 1-3, which for a dual core system shouldn't be bad at all). It is actually the nfs (network filesystem). All of Dreamhost files are sitting on nfs, which is mounted on the hosting servers. The problem with nfs, especially noticeable with a large amount of files, is that it's much slower than local disk access and is limited by network speed and congestion. Dreamhost is also looking into possible tweaks to nfs performance.

For comparison, I've installed Gallery2 (notorious for its size and slow speed) on Dreamhost and Bluehost. It's blazing fast on Bluehost, but is a couple of times slower on Dreamhost. I'm assuming that Bluehost is using a local filesystem because I don't see any other reason why it would be so much faster. So with that, I have disabled the Random Photo plugin for Lazyest-gallery which went through 2500+ files each time to figure out a random one to show (efficient approach, isn't it?). Until that is fixed, it's staying off this site.

Dreamhost is being very slow right now, each page takes 40-100s to generate. I'm trying to resolve it but with their endless deals they've got their hands full of so many customers that I don't know if anything will happen any time soon.

Updated: November 4th, 2007

Installed Ubuntu LTS 6.06 as a 2nd OS on my Dell E1505 laptop today after delaying doing this for a while. This article from digg finally made me install it, which took roughly 10 minutes, as it mentions. Compare this and 0 reboots to 45min and 5 reboots installing Windows. Ubuntu's pretty damn sweet; I'm gonna go tweak it now with the help of Arthur. I'm predicting that Linux (and Ubuntu in particular, as of now) will eat up Windows' market share surely and quickly. The dual boot is very friendly, it uses GRUB as the boot manager. To boot directly into Windows by default, I edited /boot/grub/menu.list from Ubuntu.