In a previous entry I mentioned that Sun'saddition of mmap() basically forced their hand on having a unifiedbuffer cache. Today I feel like elaborating on that.

The problem with having mmap() and not a unified buffer cache is pagecoherence. If you have some programs using mmap() and some usingregular read() and write() , you will wind up with two copies ofpages, one mapped into process memory and one in the buffer cache.Because virtual memory and the buffer

It's common to say bad things about the GIL (a round of GIL bashing happened recently, for example). I have acontrarian view: I think that the GIL is the right thing for Python.

Python needs some concurrency support, if only so that it can makeinherently blocking operations into non-blocking ones. At the sametime, the thread and shared memory based concurrent programmingmodel is a terrible one that programmers should avoid as much aspossible.

The GIL is good enough and simple enough to

This week, we:

• got 11,963 messages from 272 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,658 sessions from 1,625 different IP addresses.
• received 433,498 connections from at least 123,409 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 8 connections being checked at once.

Volume is down a fair bit from last week ,although it is nowhere near the levels I would like it to be at.The daily