I have read nice posts of Gunicorn and decided to try it out. Until now I this blog was running top of Flup and from very beginning I had some bad feelings about it. This Django based blog is running on small VPS and that’s why I’m really interested of low memory footprint. I read that Gunicorn has small memory footprint and high performance so I installed it on my VPS. Setting up Gunicorn was really easy and straightforward process which took only few minutes and released almost 40 Mb memory. I will explain the installation and configuration process shortly.

Yesterday I faced with really weird issue with PHP’s session handling. At work we are hosting dozens of sites on our servers and suddenly on one server we were getting lot of weird out of space errors when PHP tried to open session files. Error message was “Warning Unknown: open(/path/to/sessions/sess_somehash, O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28)” . Because of those errors I was believing we were somehow running out of space on apache’s temp file partition. Truth was there was only few megabytes data, but the problem was that we had over 200 000 files on one folder and PHP got crazy of that.

As I have mentioned I use now days Mercurial for my pet projects. There was one thing I was missing from Git. Git has nice feature to pick part of files for commit. Its really nice feature because I find myself regularly doing many small issues between commits which I want to commit separately.

Same kind of feature have been available for Mercurial over two years from now. It is called hg record which is made available by record extension. This increased Mercurials usability at lot. I hope this tip will help someone else who has also wondered if this kind of functionality exists in Mercurial.

Should we still consider to move on Mercurial at our work :-/

PHP 5.3.1 was released yesterday with 146 issues fixed. Today I found Sean Kerner’s blog post about it (I think link was in Reddit). I have to say I agree his feelings:

Quite provocative topic, but that was question which came in my mind when I wanted to try out new non relational databases like CouchDB or MongoDB. I will warn you: this post will contain some whining ;)

I don’t know was it the architecture or what but I had lot of problems when I was trying to install those databases. I have been using OS X 10.4 for over three years and most of the time all programs was compiling fine. If building failed it was mostly because of some missing libraries.

Recently I upgraded to OS X 10.6 which is first 64 bit OS X. With Snow leopard I haven’t even compiled anything by myself but using Macports. Whit this setup even one PHP upgrade has failed, but that was easy to fix. I run port clean php5 and tried after that again and everything went fine.