Wednesday, March 03, 2010

XMPP Web Chat

Recently I had to develop a scalable web chat which should be compatable with normal chat software like Aduim, Miranda, etc.
I decided to use a XMPP server and I liked Brad Fritzpatriks Djabberd because it's easy scalable, memory optimized (300k+ connection in only 1GB RAM), written in Perl (one of the languages I am familiar with) and easily customizable.

All went okay during the tests with Adium and PSI and I managed to complete the custom modules in just two days.

But then there was the last part - web chat system integration. I stoped my attention to JwChat looks nice and has a Facebook alike bar aka iJabBar.

And here begins the Hell ...

All web based XMPP chat clients use so called HTPP-Binding ot Polling for communication (aka BOSH) to connect to Jabber server and Djabberd has no plugin for that. Sure at first I thought I can write one but ... isn't there anything already done? ... and no, there is nothing.

I started searching for a compromise solution and I went over JabberHTTPBind and Punjab. Both unreliable and buggy. Both tested on Mac OS X and Linux. At first I tried to fix JabberHTTPBind which is written in Java, but unfortunately I am not so experienced in Java programming to fix everything and XML parsing bugs left.
Punjab on the other hand is written in python which I am familiar with but after 4 hours of debugging and trying to fix it's XML parser, too, finally I gave up.

Now, after posting this I will go and write a working XMPP BOSH script using libevent and based on phpDaemon (asynchronous PHP framework). I am starting to think like Brad (formerly SixApart's guy and now working for Google) - if there is no solution or everything out there just sux, do write your own and do it well.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Performance

Everyone in IT field who know me well is aware that I am a performance maniac.
I love making software run faster with the same resources, I love saving machines/hardware, etc.

On this topic I would recommend you a short paper about optimizations which focuses on how you should think about it to do it in the right way.

One we interesting part of the paper is:

"Won’t software with extra code path to measure timings be slower than the same software without that extra code path?

I like an answer that I heard Tom Kyte give once in response to this question.15 He estimated that the measurement intrusion effect of Oracle’s extensive performance instrumentation is negative 10% or less. 16 He went on to explain to a now-­‐vexed questioner that the product is at least 10% faster now because of the knowledge that Oracle Corporation has gained from its performance instrumentation code, more than making up for any “overhead” the instrumentation might have caused."

I admire the Tom Kyte's answer. I want to point a finger at the face of all system administrators, CTO's, etc. - people turn on logs and your profile systems. They really help developers to optimize their code. Do not just blame them that the application sucks.


And if you want to read more check Baron Schwartz's bookshelf.