Part of today was arranging to flash a new BIOS on my new machine here(in the hopes that the most recent BIOS version would fix a mysteriousmemory corruption problem). This was a bunch of annoyance, because Ihad to come up with a bootable MS-DOS floppy to run Tyan's BIOS flasherprogram from. So that I don't have to go through all the work next timearound, I'm going to put what I found here.

In the old days, it was simple

I spent part of the other day working to speed up an SCGI based program, and wound up hitting avivid illustration of the practical cost of forking in Python. I'llstart with the numbers:

• 5.3 milliseconds per request when the program forked a childto handle each request.
• 1.1 milliseconds per request when the forking was stubbedout so each request ran in the main process.

Benchmarking was done with Apache's ab , running on the same machine(and with only one request at a

I have to take back what I said just the otherday about having seen the worst stealth spider I'd ever seen. The dayafter I wrote that entry, I saw a worse case.

Like the first one , they made two valid requeststo start with and then followed them up with 65 bad ones, all in thespan of 11 seconds. Also like the first one, all their requests were badbecause they couldn't deal with absolute paths in Continue reading...