Favoretti's Braindumps

So, I managed to install windows 7 in vmware machine in the weekend. Actually in this case “managed” is a wrong word. Installation went smooth, without any issues and was done in (hold the chair) 15 minutes! I was really amazed. That’s like the fastest windows installation ever that I had, xcept those prebaked unattended installations.

I didn’t have to provide any drivers during installation (well, that doesn’t surprise me, since VMWare has pretty all-round standard devices for everything), and funnily enough VMWare tools for Vista just simply worked for Windows 7. (Finally a version of windows that doesn’t whine every time you install an “old” package).

Running 7 for the first time was also kinda fun. Windows itself in comparison with Vista has the number of default services reduced by, like, one third. Whole windows with all default services started up consumed about 480MB of RAM where approximately 150MB was used for caches. Not bad, not bad at all.

Of all the changes that you spot immediately I would like to highlight the following three:
1) The damn sidebar is gone. Jesus, what a relief.
2) Taskbar has been revamped. For good or for bad – dunno, really, have to yet try and use it all on my main desktop.
3) It’s FAST. I mean it. FAST. Even in VMWare, even with 1G RAM and even with IDE drive emulation.

Don’t get me wrong here. FAST. F.A.S.T. Hats off to Microsoft. I doubt much has changed on the inside of services and whatnot, but the UI is very very responsive and that what makes it really pleasant to use. Don’t mind the glitches of start button animation or whatever, it’s still a first public beta.

Other than that, it’s worth mentioning that it hasn’t crashed even once, all the programs I tried installing on it just installed, I haven’t noticed any program crashes yet either.

IExplorer 8, seems took the idea of Chrome, or Chrome the idea of IE8, but nowadays every tab of explorer spawns a separate process, so I hope if it crashes now it will just crash one tab. Surprisingly I’m yet to see that IE8 thing crash.

So far the very first impressions. I’ll probably install that thing on my main desktop one of these days.

Microsoft announced today the availability of Windows 7. Starting from January 9 one can download it from https://www.microsoft.com/windows7. I, for one will give it a testdrive, first in a virtual machine and if it actually works, then probably start using it.

Vista is quite ok, except the fact that it’s a damn memory hog. We’ll see if Windows 7 will do better.

Thus, I’ve been nearing 30 for the past 8 years… Today is a step closer 🙂

It’s been two months now since something drops one of my MySQLs on its knees. Run queue jumps up to 30-60 on the box, and the box starts slowly dying. Killing mysql and restarting might fix the issue for a day or two, or it might come back after a few hours.

I really can’t understand what’s happening. Either some website does something fishy… Or postfix. weird stuff, anyway.

Default settings of MySQL are in no way good to work with large databases.
Example: Virtual XEN machine, 512M RAM, default cache settings, database of 3.5GB. Queries taking 10 to 120 seconds, depending on the amount of joins/records returned.

Same database, other machine with 8GB RAM, caching is set to 512M for query caches, query_cache_limit 2G, sort, join, read buffers 256M, key_buffer at 2G, innodb_buffer_pool_size 4G, log file 1G, log_buffer 256M. Same queries 0.0011 sec to 2.5-3 sec tops..

You do the math. Lesson learned (maybe the wrong one): Indexing and proper database design is not everything. 🙂

Trying to speed up MySQL queries. I must admit that when it comes to indexing tables that are joined alltogether and use foreign keys almost everywhere that’s one hell of a task, since foreign key index always wins due to index merges and intersects.

Happy New Year to everyone, Merry X-mas (the 25th one), Merry upcoming X-mas (the 7th one).