Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Trippy]

Yay, my home PC has gone into a lovely nvlddmkm.sys blue screen crash loop.  Sometimes it'll even manage to make it all of the way to loading Windows before it poops out.  Apparently this is a common problem, so I'll try some of the solutions I've seen.  Fucking nvidia.

Somewhat related, my PC seems to freeze up every day or two.  It just straight locks.  No blue screen, but mouse/kb stops working and the clock stops advancing time.  No error in the logs at all that would indicate what's happening. Could this be a motherboard issue or RAM?  I'm a bit worried that with all of the work I had to do a year or two back to fix my video card issues (RMA'd) that somehow I damaged some of the board components.

What are the temps when it locks up?

[Rasix]

It'll lock at idle.  Maybe 40-50C.

[Salamok]

Anyone have experience with RAID using MLC SSD's on database and/or web servers?  My worry is the heavy write usage from website log files and database writes but  even though my budget doesn't allow for enterprise SLC drives I am thikning there is still some faster than mechanical and yet still stable configuration that can use high end MLC drives.  Serverwise I was thinking of going with a Dell Poweredge 720xd (24x 2.5" bays) with a PERC 710P RAID controller not sure how compatible that would be with aftermarket drives or even which drives to get or what RAID config to use.

[Trippy]

We use the Intel 320s (mostly 160s, some larger) on our MySQL boxes. We're not using RAID on those, though, and instead have master-master replication setup for handling failures. Why would you want to run your Web servers and put your Web logs on SSDs?

[Salamok]

Mostly because we are soon to be implementing a slow as fuck cms and my initial reaction is to throw hardware at it. 

edit - The site we are running probably isn't busy enough to justify a cluster.  I'm thinking single MS 2012 production server running 2 nodes (1 MS SQL Server and 1 IIS node) and loaded up with SSDs, then a second test server with mostly the same setup and no SSDs.  Not sure what exactly is causing the CMS slowness but the fastest implementation I have seen has been delivering the html document (just the text document no image or script includes) in 3.5 seconds and most of the sites I have seen are even slower than that, my guess is way too many queries but it could also be excessive analytics or logging.

[Chimpy]

Is it an ASP.NET CMS?

If so, throwing disc speed at it probably won't speed it up after a certain point, you need to make sure all the rendered .NET pages stay in cache. We just moved to Sitefinity and we have another box that does a wget on all pages on the production/test sites every I think 10 minutes. With that, there is literally (after the initial loads of the page) zero difference in performance between a box with 4 cores and 16GB of RAM and a box with 2 cores and 8GB of RAM. Before we started running the wget script to keep it in the asp.net cache, pages that were not visited frequently would take up to 20 seconds to load. Now everything loads pretty much as one would expect for your general website.

When I watch the performance tab on the task manager on initial page loads, it pegs 2 cores for 15-20 seconds.

This is with the storage for both the IIS and the SQL guests on the 15k tier of our Compellent.

[Salamok]

Yeah Sitefinity is exactly the CMS I am moving to.

Now everything loads pretty much as one would expect for your general website.

My expectation is that you should be able to deliver a web page w/o relying on cache in under a second and a half.  Obviously that will never happen with Sitefinity, so is your wget script dynamically crawling the site or do you manually configure it with the pages you want it to hit?

[HaemishM]

I have a love-hate relationship with Sitefinity. The site we did for one of our clients is one of the reasons behind one of their big patches two Christmases ago. It does some amazing things but the backend is fucking slow as shit most of the time.

[Salamok]

I'm going into it thinking of it as a rapid website development tool.  In a few months, after we have revamped and organized our hundreds of content pages, I'll probably migrate to something else.  The module builder is like 80% awesome and 20% wtf.

[Trippy]

It'll lock at idle.  Maybe 40-50C.

Try a different power supply.

[Chimpy]

Yeah Sitefinity is exactly the CMS I am moving to.

Now everything loads pretty much as one would expect for your general website.

My expectation is that you should be able to deliver a web page w/o relying on cache in under a second and a half.  Obviously that will never happen with Sitefinity, so is your wget script dynamically crawling the site or do you manually configure it with the pages you want it to hit?

The cache stuff you can blame Microsoft for (from what I could tell from my reading into it a few months ago), asp.net code is just plain slow to run.

Our crawler just has the DNS names of the sites to crawl explicitly listed (we don't have many). It runs as a windows scheduled task on a box we have run a number of scripts. I can send you a snippet of the code if you want, it is all of like 10 lines.

Sitefinity, in my opinion after 8 months of trying to get it to do what they say it can do, is not worth the hassle. Any product that requires you to both make settings changes in the web gui and then go and make changes in the config files manually is clownshoes. And any product that requires you to actually write your own code pages to secure the backend (oh yeah, and you can't IP whitelist the backend because the master css files are stored in that directory... ), ugh.

And don't get me started on their "documentation", I have had to put in support tickets just to get them to explain to me how I am actually supposed to get something to work when I follow their instructions to the letter only to find "oh, you need to change this config file manually!".

[Salamok]

The .Net excuse is a cop out, both Ektron and Sitecore are plenty fast enough.  I agree that not being able to do the entire thing through the gui makes the gui just an extra PITA step to learn/go through but it isn't like every time you toss a new page up you need to go through that.  I hear the forums are halfway decent for muddling through stuff.  Have you done any VS development for Sitefinity yet (aka Sitethunder)?  I was really hoping to use Sitecore instead but having to tackle the learning curve on top of a major redesign of 2 largish websites had everyone scared there.  Hopefully once we get everything redone in Sitefinity we can revisit migrating to Sitecore.

edit - My gut feeling is that the speed issues in Sitefinity have more to do with them being forced to use the entire gambit of Telerik widgets and doodads (Kendo UI, Radcontrols, etc...) and that while these may be fine for writing web applications in .Net they aren't tuned very well to the extra burdens associated with creating a templating engine/cms.

[Chimpy]

The .Net excuse is a cop out, both Ektron and Sitecore are plenty fast enough.  I agree that not being able to do the entire thing through the gui makes the gui just an extra PITA step to learn/go through but it isn't like every time you toss a new page up you need to go through that.  I hear the forums are halfway decent for muddling through stuff.  Have you done any VS development for Sitefinity yet (aka Sitethunder)?  I was really hoping to use Sitecore instead but having to tackle the learning curve on top of a major redesign of 2 largish websites had everyone scared there.  Hopefully once we get everything redone in Sitefinity we can revisit migrating to Sitecore.

I am strictly the infrastructure/server guy (I am not a programmer of any sort, tweaking scripts is about all I do). The "web developers" are the ones doing all of the other stuff and they are, well let's just say that using the term developer in their title is not very truthful.

[Rasix]

It'll lock at idle.  Maybe 40-50C.

Try a different power supply.

Don't have a spare with enough juice for the current vid card.  Anyhow, it started bugging out again.  Image would distort and then the system would freeze.  Tried reseating it, blowing out dust.  Computer wouldn't even boot anymore. 

This fucking card.  It never sat right in the slot and the previous one had a fan die on it.  This is the RMA'd one. There's so much crap hanging off it, it wiggles its way out of the slot and does this from time to time. However, I'm afraid it's past the point of no return now.  I don't think I can even RMA it anymore, as it's been a while.

Put the 8800gt in.  At this point I think I'm going to have to start replacing a number of parts.  Vid card first, I suppose.

[Hawkbit]

Anyone have any tips on a free IIS log interpreter that we can use in an enterprise environment?  We have a rogue project we're trying to keep under wraps until the right time. 

Like this, but free.  (I know, I know.) 

http://www.lizard-labs.net/log_parser_lizard.aspx

[Yegolev]

Maybe Awstats + ActiveState Perl?

[Salamok]

Painful to set up but it is probably the best you are going to get for free.

[Hawkbit]

Thanks much!  I'll run it through the team and see what's what.  Much appreciated!

[Reg]

Those awful pictures that slide down your screen to stay in the same position as you scroll are getting more and more obnoxiously common.  Is there something I can do maybe with a Firefox addon that'll get rid of these things?  I'd so far as to change browsers if I have to.

[Pennilenko]

Those awful pictures that slide down your screen to stay in the same position as you scroll are getting more and more obnoxiously common.  Is there something I can do maybe with a Firefox addon that'll get rid of these things?  I'd so far as to change browsers if I have to.

I use Adblock plus, combined with Ghostery, and BetterPrivacy.. I never see those pictures you speak of.

[Miasma]

I use "Element Hiding Helper" that integrates itself with adblock.  Then you can open up adblock and an option to hide elements will be there.  I have wound up hiding so many annoying things that I think it is making firefox slow down though.

[Salamok]

noscript and just don't whitelist any add providers.

[Yegolev]

Noscript!

[Reg]

Sigh. I used to run NoScript but it got annoying looking at its alarms on every single page I went to.  Oh well, maybe its gotten better in the last couple of years.

edit: Oh! and thanks all for the answers to my question.

[Trippy]

Just turn off the alerts.

[Reg]

OK it's installed and the alerts are turned off but when I go to salon.com I still see the obnoxious little search/facebook/twitter buttons that are permanently at the top of the page even if I try to scroll away.  Is there something I need to do to them to block them?  I tried rightclicking on them but nothing seemed obvious to do.

edit: I figured it out.  I added the extension to Adblock Plus that disables social media buttons and that seemed to do it.  I'll have to mess around a little to see if it's blocking more or less than what I want.

[Morat20]

My internet connection's been a bit flakey lately -- (ATT u-verse). Seems like every weeked I start getting more and more packet loss until the dang thing just decides it can't even resolve hosts, and then I reboot the stupid router/box/gateway/whatever and then it works.

Which, okay, I can live with.

The think that just really irritates me is Windows 7. I reboot the router, the router comes back up and EVERY device in the household (phones, Xbox, iPads, etc) all find the wifi, reconnect, and go on with life.

Except Windows 7 on my PC. Which takes another five minutes or so before it FINALLY sees the network is back up and can reconnect. I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

[Chimpy]

My internet connection's been a bit flakey lately -- (ATT u-verse). Seems like every weeked I start getting more and more packet loss until the dang thing just decides it can't even resolve hosts, and then I reboot the stupid router/box/gateway/whatever and then it works.

Which, okay, I can live with.

The think that just really irritates me is Windows 7. I reboot the router, the router comes back up and EVERY device in the household (phones, Xbox, iPads, etc) all find the wifi, reconnect, and go on with life.

Except Windows 7 on my PC. Which takes another five minutes or so before it FINALLY sees the network is back up and can reconnect. I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

You probably should check and see if it has multiple cached networks and delete them (Merge and delete network locations). That shit will cause all kinds of funkytown stuff.

[Salamok]

So doing a small bit of reading and revisiting my earlier idea that there should be some way to increase the number of IP addresses available on the work network without modifying immediately modifying the subnet mask of every single device.  

Given the following IPv4 info:

Address: 172.16.1.10
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 172.16.1.2

If I take the above and plug it into this subnet calculator I found:
http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/SubnetCalculator.jsp?ipAddress=172.16.1.10&cidr=24

Could I change this /24 subnet to a /23 and double my available addresses by just modifying the subnet on the gateway and any new clients?  My half assed logic here is that changing it to a /23 does not modify the Broadcast Address of 172.16.1.255...  I realized 172.16.1.xxx stuff that is still configured for the /24 subnet wont see things on 172.16.0.xxx but what if I am just dropping in a stand alone lamp server or something that doesn't need to interact with the rest of the network (other than the gateway)?  Long term goal would be to update the subnet masks for every device to 255.255.254.0 but in the mean time would it be likely to break anything by just updating the gateway?

[schild]

My computer is currently a Q9450 with a 4800 series Radeon and 4GB of RAM.

What is the most likely culprit for games locking up, dropping out, and reloading. I suspect it's that I simply don't have enough RAM to load the game into memory properly. I'd like it to not be my GPU or Processor, so that's basically wishful thinking.

Edit: Firefox, Trilian, and Steam are running on bootup (oh, and everything.exe). It uses up 2.4GB of my 4GB total. Comeon be a memory issue!

[Ingmar]

You could be running into swapping with that much used already but I don't know that it would be a cause of lockups. My gut says video card. 64 bit OS?

[schild]

Win7 64. I believe it's a graphics swapping issue. It's not a hard lock. it like dumps video memory and reloads the games. Runs fine for 5-30 minutes depending on the game and does it again.

[Yegolev]

When looking for what isn't working: always bet on ATi.


Also W7 with 4GB RAM is awful.

[Ingmar]

That is a classic ATI graphics driver crash it sounds like to me.

[schild]

Should I roll back from the newest drivers to a specific one or install the beta ones? Also, sounds like I should buy a bucket of ram.