giulianob

I started a thread on the Mono mailing list a couple months ago about web hosting performance on Mono ( http://mono.1490590.n4.nabble.com/FastCGI-Performance-td4662... ). It turns out the default implementation for FastCGI is really slow. Some members of the community have created a few different implementations. The fastest one currently is a thin wrapper over evhttp which can handle over 100k requests per second on a simple benchmark. There are other discussions as well about how to improve performance.

Did you read the article?

"ASP.NET vNext (and Rosyln) runs on Mono, on both Mac and Linux today. While Mono isn't a project from Microsoft, we'll collaborate with the Mono team, plus Mono will be added to our test matrix. It's our aspiration that it "just work.""

Yep it was Nourish right in downtown Savannah.

This isn't in Georgia by any chance is it? I was at a bath and body store that used the Square setup. First time I saw and as a techy person I thought it was neat but maybe just because it was different but not because it was simpler to checkout or anything.

I was thinking the same. Why can't you hook it up to a running car and get some charge in the battery to get to the nearest charging station?

The video is really nice but the site is really hard to navigate. The scrolling on the front page is really wonky (I use a regular mouse on PC and I have to scroll the wheel about a dozen times before the page goes down), browser back navigation is totally broken when you have the menu open, the menu is really hidden it almost feels like you're not supposed to use it. I was trying to find the list of features and it took me a while to even see the menu with the features page. Maybe add a "see more features" on the front page where you list the most important ones to take you to the more detailed view.

The app itself is very nice.

Yep I'm learning that the more "lazy" I get the better quality software I release. You have to know which battles to fight and where cutting corners will save you a ton of time/bugs but won't hurt the end user too much. That's what makes a good programmer IMO.

Someone just asked this below.. see http://autocomplete.redis.io/

Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation, etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list of things you aren't allowed to post is huge ( http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules ). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so they should be less subjective imo.

The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and often highly biased people.

Yes but if everyone using SES is getting blacklisted then you will also have a lot of legit emails being blocked.

I just recommend instead using a custom data- attribute to identify your elements so you don't rely either on text, HTML structure, or CSS classes since all of those can change but may not affect functionality therefore should not break your test.

Does your product provide proper page objects? The way it's used in the examples (where the test specifies the direct page interactions) will quickly create difficult to maintain code. For example, http://canvascode.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/maintainable-auto...

Linode says they only host the same plan types on the same physical hardware. For example, if you have an 8gb plan then all your neighbors are on the same plan. This might be why they have to physically move your image.

Mainly around spinning up instances and network latency.

Can you run https://github.com/mgutz/vpsbench and see how the performance is to compare?

I need 2gb - 4gb servers and DO's quality has decreased since they've grown so much.

Holy crap this is awesome. Good job guys at Linode. I said I would switch if the prices dropped about 25% because RAM was pricey.... So now I have to switch.

"A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development."

That's not true. There are many scenarios where devs also understand ops and do both. It's getting rid of the "throw it over the wall" mentality and incorporating ops within dev itself IMO. And devs love to automate things so we have created a lot of tools for that.

What issues were you having?

What type of app were you running? Website or regular app? Also what version of Mono were you using? I have been running my server app for a few months now on 3.x and had some issues. For example, the default threadpool size is too small, the default implementation of FastCGI on Mono is super slow (there are alternatives out), and the GC behaves a bit differently (nursery size and collection schedule is different). I did have to learn more about the gritty details than when using .NET on Windows but you can fine tune most things. Things are running pretty smooth now though I am still trying to figure out how to debug from a GDB core dump.

Hey another follow up about FastCGI performance for those who are interested.

I asked on the mono dev list about FastCGI performance and it turns out there is a dev who wrote his own FastCGI implementation for Mono. It turns out that Mono uses .NET remoting to talk between the FastCGI process manager and the child processes and remoting is super slow. It would be interesting to see how it compares to evhttp but you can find the source here: https://github.com/xplicit/HyperFastCgi and his blog posts about profiling FastCGI here: http://forcedtoadmin.blogspot.com/2013/11/servicestack-perfo...

If you do make it OWIN compatible or a FastCGI wrapper for libevent that would be awesome. Right now, you need to basically have nginx proxy all the requests to evhttp which probably adds a little bit of overhead over doing it through FastCGI directly.

Edit: Actually from what I've seen, Mono uses epoll/kqueue for async IO which is what libevent uses as well. I think the problem might not be so much that libevent is faster than what Mono can do in plain C# but rather that the FastCGI implementation has some bottlenecks or is not using the most performant APIs available. I haven't had time to profile it though.

If you're using Mono for web hosting then don't use Mono's FastCGI implementation. It's incredibly slow from what I've seen. Instead, use something like evhttp-sharp which has a wrapper for Nancy. Just to give you an idea look at nancy using evhttp ("nancy-libevent2" in the benchmark) vs FastCgi ("nancy" in the benchmark) at http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...

I've tried to contact the folks who are maintaining FastCgi on Mono but the email I sent last week bounced. When you use evhttp though, (at least with C#) there's not a huge performance difference than when using it in Windows.

MonoDevelop is cross platform compatible and its decent but it's certainly no Visual Studio.

Depending on what you are doing, Mono has come very far. The new GC is in and a lot of optimizations have been made. Ubuntu 14 will ship with 3.2.8 I believe which has all the goodies. Apparently the performance is still poor for web development but it works well for daemons/desktop apps. You're probably better starting off with a tech that is cross platform out of the box instead of relying on Mono but if you have an existing C# project then Mono is awesome.

There's a trade off though. If C# only runs on Windows then a lot of developers who run Linux will never consider C# as an option. If it does run on Linux, then those developers might end up purchasing Visual Studio in order to develop C#. A lot of developers who previously used C# are also leaving the tech for others like Ruby since they aren't tied to Windows.

What's the likelihood the .NET VM is open sourced as well? I use Mono right now to run my apps on Linux but it would be great to use the official implementation since Mono has subtle differences.

I don't think the argument is that jQuery can do the same things. I think the argument is that you can have two way bindings and a lot of the benefits without a lot of the complexity of Angular.

You can now set the Metro background to the same background as the desktop. It's a small detail that has made the experience much less jarring for me.