Clker.com – weblog

My server has been suffering from unexplainable apache hangs. Once in a while, apache would stop accepting new connections. It will keep running in memory but all incoming connections will timeout. Since then, my only solution was a bash script that runs every minute and tries to read a text file from the website. If it fails, it would restart apache.

On Fri evening, I replaced APC with Memcache. Although I know that Memcache is little bit slower than APC due to lots of reasons including network overhead, yet it was APC’s turn to get tested in the sequence of tests I’ve been running. It seems that APC was the reason apache was hanging. I know that some big websites like facebook use APC, but maybe they are using a different version. I also know that youtube is using memcahe, so APC was one of my least suspects. The server has been running for the past 48 hours without a crash or a hang, which is more than its average. Usually, it used to hang once every 20 hours or so.

Since I had my own caching functions, that finally called APC, the amount of code changes were very small. Hopefully it will continue running without problems.

I’ve been seriously considering writing my own webserver instead of running apache. Although apache is very good, yet, sometimes I feel things will be much funner if write this website even in C. My reasoning is although PHP is fast and APC provides a further boost, yet at one point I will have to cluster a set of machines and proxy the requests because of various tweeks that need to get done in every piece of software.

So, I started considering seriously how to write a webserver that is optimized for high requests and can make better use of memory, and how to resolve the biggest problem in C, which is crashes due to memory allocation and writing outside arrays without slowing down the C speed even a bit.

I ended up writing a small library does that memory stuff, and a small webserver and I’ve been playing with them for a while and without a surprise, I found that I can serve more than 1000 pages a second very easy without attempting to optimize dealing with strings and just with basic STL string, which in my opinion is very slow.

What I still need to do is to support the CGI stuff, so I can execute the current PHP code and run it beside the C and that will give me more time to port the website pages in phases without stopping the website, or delaying running this server.

Bug updates stopping the plugin to run on some FreeBSD installtions. Thanks to David Newman with networktest.com for his positive & helpful feedback.

You can download the latest plugin from here.

Just fixed a usability problem. Lots of visitors complained that when they clicked “download” nothing happened. By reviewing the website, I found that I used an up arrow, and a down arrow for voting for the picture with a positve vote, or a negative vote. However, users misunderstood that, and I don’t blame them!

I switched the icons to a green up thumb, and a down red thumb for voting for a picture. Also, added a disk icon, with an arrow pointing down in the area, which has the different download formats.

Hope this helps and reduces confusion.

So finally today someone in wordpress approved the clker clipart plugin. I uploaded the plugin to the SVN repository, and their system generated the .ZIP file that wordpress users need to download.

Of course nothing is perfect. It took several iterations to get the generated zip file to work on wordpress after it gets downloaded and unzipped.

I  believe I did a good job on that one. I’ve got lots of other ongoing projects including a lot of social networking code, after which I really need to update the openoffice plugin to be something similar to the wordpress one. It looks like the basket idea wasn’t very usable.

If the openoffice plugin was totally functional from inside openoffice without the need to visit the website, I believe it will be of more value and that’s what I intend to do… hopefully when I’m done with what in my hands now.

It seems weird to me that Opera did not support adding search providers using the opensearch XML files. However, I found an alternative way to add search engines to Opera. Unfortunately, it requires the user to do it manually.

To add a search provider 1. Right click on the search field 2. Select ‘Create Search’ 3. Give the new search engine a title and a keyword.

It is very easy and smart, where the browser takes the post url and uses it as the search engine URL!

Technorati Tags: opera, search engines, search providers, quick search, clker

Newer version is here

While I was writing the repeated images identification post, I modified the mimetex wordpress plugin to be the GNUPlot wordpress plugin.

The plugin executes GNUPlot over any portion of the text enclosed between [ gplot] and [/ gplot] tags, without the spaces of course.

Example:

[ gplot]

set size 0.75, 0.3

set xrange[0:5]

plot sin(x) title “sin(x)”, sin(2*x) title “sin(2x)”

[/ gplot]

would generate:

Download: Download the GNUPlot plugin for wordpress

Installation:

- Make sure that your server has gnuplot installed

- Create the directory <wordpress>/wp-content/cache, and make sure it is writable by the web server

Enjoy

Technorati Tags: wordpress, chart, gnuplot, plugin

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately adding tags and descriptions to clip art images, which helps visitors find what they are looking for. From the almost 15,000 I’ve done 3000 over about a six weeks. It seems to be a very long, and slow process yet I believe it significantly adds to the quality since pictures can be found. I’ve also added around 300 pictures. The most recent ones are for Barack Obama, Hillary and McCain, some insurance related cliparts (life insurance, car insurance, home insurance), also some splashes for bargains, price cuts and price reductions.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Hillary, McCain, clipart, cleanup, tagging

Now you can upload multiple files at ones. Zip all your SVG images in one zip file, and upload the zip file. The upload page will then loop through all SVG files stores inside the zip, and will try to add them.  Upload limit is still 2MBytes.

Technorati Tags: clker.com,   svg, clipart, upload

I’ve been recently working on the website theme, colors both on the weblog side and the main website’s side. I believe it looks much nicer and less crowded this way. I will be synchronizing the style sheet of Wordpress and the website’s main part so that visitors and users won’t feel they’ve moved into a different place.

I also added a privacy policy page, still have to link that to the footer of the blog. Sometimes, after commits and updates some functionalities are broken. I will be checking and testing around the website to make sure everything still works. You can leave a comment here if you face.

I’ve been experimenting spatial image querying lately. Hopefully, below every image spatially similar ones will be showing soon regardless whether they were tagged or no. There’s a lot of work involved here, and hopefully I will roll out soon at least some experimental version to see how users react to it.

Technorati Tags: website, theme, wordpress, update, colors