So, Facebook has released HipHop PHP - a PHP-to-C++ converter. While the name is stupid, the idea is not. 100% of their developers know PHP, I would guess that less than 5% of them are proficient at C++. So, HipHop takes their PHP code, and converts it to compiled C++ -- in turn, they get a huge boost in performance and get to keep their existing developers. HipHop is also it's own webserver too - fun!

My first thought was: I wonder what this could mean for Drupal? Well, David Struass, a maintainer of Pressflow (a set of patches for Drupal performance and scalability) put up a blog post about what it would take for Pressflow and Drupal to become HipHop-friendly. Exciting times!

At $work, we have a lot of java processes that are ran via cron and other wrappers that do some pretty critical tasks. The apps have been written so that the whole thing is wrapped in a try/catch that will call system.exit(1) should something not go right. Our wrapper scripts watch for a non-zero exit code, and alert Nagios if something went wrong.

This works great except for when a VM encounters an outOfMemory exception (OOM). The Java VM attempts to continue on, but if the main thread hits this exception, the entire VM will exit. However, the application code that exits with a status of 1 never gets called, so the application ends up dying with a status of 0. Well, Sun (Oracle now I guess) gave us a new option in Java 6 that was backported to 1.4.2_12 and up that allows us to tell Java to run a shell command when it encounters an OOM exception. By adding the option

-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="kill -9 %p"

to our Java command line, the VM will execute a shell that calls the kill command, with an argument of the PID of the VM. The -9 option to kill will cause the VM to exit with a non-zero status, so that our wrappers will pick up the error and alert the right people.

Note: this feature was never backported to Java5 - sorry!

At $work, we use Hudson extensively, and it rocks. For those who don't know already, Hudson is an implementation of Continuous Integration that is remarkably easy to use. I wrote about my first impressions of Hudson previously. Hudson's original audience was Java developers using Ant or Maven, but with plugins and some hacking, we can make it do some things for us as module contributors to Drupal.

There's a nasty upstream bug in GTK present in Ubuntu 9.10 that makes Eclipse Galileo all but unusable -- specifically it makes clicking many buttons with the mouse just stop working. You can use tab and spacebar to make it work, but that's not much of a workaround. All you need to do is set an environment variable before starting Eclipse:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

Just a quick posting of some simple benchmarks today.  Please note, these are not the be all, end all performance results that allow everyone to scream from atop yonder hill that Solaris performs better than Linux!  This was just me doing a little due dilligence.  I like Solaris 10, and wanted to run it on our webservers.  We're looking at using NGINX to serve up some static files, and I wanted to make sure it performed like it should on Solaris 10 before deploying it - you know, right tool for the job and all.  So, disclaimers aside, here's what I found.