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April 2006
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Laterooms, GC, and Mono
I just noticed a post by Tim Anderson on Laterooms.com gives up on Mono which is worth reading if you're thinking about designing something to run on Mono. Laterooms migrated their site from PHP to .NET using Mono on Linux and suffered major memory management problems when they went live, reported in this post on the Mono list. Tim's post has a recent comment by Gavin Hamill of Laterooms which suggests that garbage collection in Mono is not yet at the same level as Microsoft's implementation:
The core cause appears to be Mono's non-existant garbage collection - well I say non-existant - it features the Boehm algorithm which as I understand is intended as a helper for C coders...
...We expected the runtime to compact + optimise this memory use. It did not; whoops. Had we known Mono was so poorly featured in this dept, we surely would have implemented a disk-based cache strategy...
...Including only Boehm in an 'enterprise' product is insane - isn't half the point of higher level languages like C# that you don't need to think about dull issues such as memory management? I thought we left that behind with C...
As it happens I was involved in some discussions last year about whether the .NET part of the application I work on could run on Linux using Mono. Nothing came of this, mainly because it was perceived there were too many unknowns surrounding the use of Mono, for example intellectual property issues. If in some hypothetical scenario we had ported to Linux using Mono then at least we would probably have detected any garbage collection issues during the intensive load testing we perform before going live with a release - some of our tests drive servers at full load for several weeks - if not at the prototyping stage. Gavin Hamill hints that their performance testing was maybe not as extensive as it should have been:
Functional testing went well (as did the limited performance testing) and live-day came.
At least they were able to move to Windows and .NET without too much trouble.
Bits and Pieces
Like EricK I've been sick, with a flu-like virus in my case. It wiped me out mentally as well as physically and I had to take a few days off work. Its frustrating when you thnk you have almost recovered to find that it impossible to do something as physically undemanding as software development, let alone blogging. Anyway here are some assorted links which I need to clear in Bloglines.
Via Dare I came across Jim Carson's piece about schedule chicken. Made me think of that frisson of guilty pleasure you feel when you hear another team has slipped, removing the pressure on your own team. Perhaps this could be called schedulefreude.
A couple of months ago a friend told me that her hairdresser had told her that she knew someone who worked for Britsh Telecom. This person had told the hairdresser that BT were piping the content of all phonecalls to the British security services. My friend wanted to get a recording of a particular phonecall and her hairdresser offered to ask the BT person. We were amused by the implausibility of this but maybe the last laugh is on us.
The "launch" of Origami was heralded as a successful piece of viral marketing. However at the time it seemed like a flop to me because it was all tease and no product, another example of Microsoft hyping something up long before it was ready. All the buzz that was built up and then... nothing. At least when Apple announces something you can usually place an order for it even if it won't be shipped for a few weeks. The launch of Samsung's umpc reinforced this (via Signals vs Noise). That a major company can make such a hash of their demo puts the boot in even further.
Kathy Sierra asks animals love exercise... why don't we? She has photos of horses running around a paddock. This is the opposite of my experience. I've never seen the two horses in the field next to the cemetary in the village where we live do anything more than stand around eating, i.e. pretty much like many people.
Steve Makofsky has a piece about being tired of technology. I've read about a couple of surveys which claim that people in the UK reached peak average happiness in the mid 1970's and that its being going down ever since. Is it more than just coincidence that it was in this decade that computer technology started to influence our lives in a big way?
CrazyBob.org asks Why do sites provide both RSS and Atom feeds? I always thought that this was so you could express an opinion about Dave Winer.