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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-11-08

@Sengupta I already have skype for that in reply to Sengupta #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-11-01

@bensonk42 true in reply to bensonk42 #

@cwr_ro User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.13 , se pare ca ti-au gasit parola de la squirrelmail in reply to cwr_ro #

@chrisgarrett C) leave unless they share revenue with publishers / tweeters in reply to chrisgarrett #

@banane that's no fun. You should have let them alone and hope they talk about you then mess with them in reply to banane #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-10-25

@CommentLuv maybe because the unsubscribe link is hidden or not visible enough ... in reply to CommentLuv #

@CommentLuv that's why some put it at the top #

@mihaibrehar maybe ... but doesn't mean the ideas in there are not true in reply to mihaibrehar #

@musterr vreau si eu o invitatie la wave. Thanks in reply to musterr #

who's using twitter lists? share your lists people ... give me something to follow, let's start #listfollowfriday #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-10-18

@DominiqueGoh so just add a link in that 1st paragraph... though it might be hard if you have many in reply to DominiqueGoh #

just logged into identi.ca with openid, using my blog as the openid provider, nice http://ff.im/9fgya #

SMTP auth is great if you want smtp relay without the spam but it's useless if the users have 12345 for passwords #

@ntoper dude that's spam and you don't even seem to be a bot in reply to ntoper #

@ntoper np, good luck with your service, btw ( spam back ) if you need a fast MTA let me know in reply to ntoper #

@tomadaniel a feature that virtualmin lacks in reply to tomadaniel #

@virtualmin ops, my bad, I guess #webmin just needs better defaults on that module in reply to virtualmin #

@segphault what would that be? a netbot? botnets we already have in reply to segphault #

@tuxradar basic ipc in reply to tuxradar #

how to not get any clicks on your adsense: put it on a sidebar that is hidden by default #

@brassblogs seems like it requires more then email...maybe something like a helpdesk system in reply to brassblogs #

it's a fact.: the longer your email message is the more likely the receiver will not read it all #

ok maybe they don't need it but I sure do #

that should have been Follow Self Pings plugin #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-10-11

Wordpres creates all links to comment author's site or pingbacks/trackbacks with "nofollow external" . This includes links to your own blog. Apparently this is bad for your pagerank according to this post:Pinging Your Own Blog Posts? Good or Bad?

The Solution

On that article mentioned above, the author suggested that you can use a plugin that would make wordpress stop creating pingback links to your own blog. I didn't like that idea so here's mine: a plugin that will make wordpres NOT add "external nofollow" to the pings to your own blog.

The plugin doesn't require any configuration, just download, install , activate and forget about it.

Download

UPDATE: The plugin is now hosted in wordpress plugins directory. That means you can install it dirrectly from  your wordpress admin or go to it's page to download it: Follow Self Pings Plugin

The first version of the plugin had a small but that prevented it from working on blogs that were installed in one director and had the home page pointing to something else. This bug is fixed in version 0.2 . You should be able to  update it from the plugin admin.

This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

Follow Self Pings

compile with debugging symbols: gcc -g -g2 , make sure there's no ( -s ) in there and gdb will even tell you the line where code crashes #

wow I surprised by file-roller. Opened file in archive, modified, saved and it asked me if I want to update the archive too. Impressive! #

@khelo nu-i adevarat. Daca nu mergi la scoala nu se pune ca ai inceput scoala in reply to khelo #

@khelo nici la aia nu se pune in reply to khelo #

@dmuth wow, reminds me of recursion gone wild in the dos programming days in reply to dmuth #

I just disabled follower notifications from twitter. No more bots bothering me now #

@tvdw yes, that's it in reply to tvdw #

@alauser maybe bots don't follow you . I'd love to be in that position in reply to alauser #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-10-04

now that I managed to insert 7000 pages in #wordpress I have another problem. Page admin super slow #

@filipcte yeah, food is for wimps in reply to filipcte #

I had no idea @ginatrapani has a wife, but it seems so from this article: http://tinyurl.com/l5g7dy in reply to ginatrapani #

@iulia_nalatan prosti, da' multi in reply to iulia_nalatan #

@mariussescu traba cu capitalul nu e asa importanta dar aia 3 ani de scutire de impozit e prea de tot ... miroase a campanie electorala ? in reply to mariussescu #

If you get any spamy dm from my twitter account, please let me know, It's not me but who knows who has my password ... maybe even a worm #

@swhitley small and unimportant naming inconsistency in reply to swhitley #

@thomasfuchs very useful when you don't want them to know you sent the message at 3 am in reply to thomasfuchs #

@denniston it also depends on the content you are sending and on the qmail setup you have ( patch bundle magic ) in reply to denniston #

@dmuth he wrote man pages though... in reply to dmuth #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-09-27

It seems this is not a new problem and there is a bug created in 2007 about it. Although it seems like there was a patch to fix this, the problem still exists in the 2.8.4 version.

Why is this so slow ?

Short story: because wordpress is trying to display and sort pages hierarchically .

At first I thought the problem was caused by the sql queries that fetched all the pages ( even though it doesn't display all of them on a page ) but that was not the case.

After profiling the code with xdebug and Kcachegrind I found there were a few parts of the code that were taking the longest time to complete.

The main problem is that wordpress is trying to find the children for all the pages in an inefficient way. There is this function get_page_children in wp-includes/post.php  which was taking about 2 thirds of the total time to complete ( ~ 2 minutes on my example  ).

The Solution

I rewrote that function to make it a lot more efficient. In my case it reduced the time from 2 minute to 1-2 seconds but on other page hierarchy it might take more, the worst case being when every page is the parent of another page.  The diff is here : Fast page_get_children-0.1 (1.05 KB)

The second problem is that wordpress updates the page cache every time you list pages. This was taking almost 1 minute to complete. I'm not sure if it's the right thing to just remove that call to update_page_cache in wp-includes/post.php get_pages , but doing that made the page admin load in about 15 seconds.

Now this might still be annoying but it's way better then 3 minutes. Hopefully at least the new get_page_children function will b included in the next wordpress release... maybe you can help promote this ticket by giving it a positive vote although I'm not sure if those votes actually have any influence.

This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

Faster wordpress page admin

@mihaibrehar cred ca nu au auzit de "eat your own dog food" #

@tudormoldovan va fi WIN atunci cand cele vandute deja se evapora in reply to tudormoldovan #

vampire Bill wants to be a spammer http://bit.ly/17fFuN #

@wptavern and a lot of patience in reply to wptavern #

@mariussescu uau, startrek in reply to mariussescu #

@ozh @woork very good job indeed, looks just like a #wordpress site in reply to ozh #

@wptavern now that's how secure software should be created ... bonus points if it can also publish a post or two by itself in reply to wptavern #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-09-20

The Problem

The more pages you add the slower your script will be. With about 700 pages my script took 12 seconds to add a new page.
After digging through the code I found out that wp_insert_code calls $wp_rewrite->flush_rules() every time a new post or page is inserted and that this is what takes the most time to finish.
Now it makes sense, the more pages you have the more rules ( permalinks ) you have and more time it will take to finish that function call.

The Solution

The call to $wp_rewrite->flush_rules() can be disabled by defining WP_IMPORTING. Now inserting a post takes just a second or less. But you still have to call $wp_rewrite->flush_rules() after you're done inserting all posts. This call will take quite a lot depending on the total number of posts/pages you have but it's a lot better to call it only once then a few hundreds or thousand times.

The way wordpress updates it's rules needs to change. Even if we can solve the bulk import problem by calling flush_rules at the end , we end up with a blog with thousands of pages where trying to publish a new post manually might take 30 or more seconds.

This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

Fast page insert in wordpress

if you're not a bot, that is #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-09-13

The Problem

Applying the patch and setting concurrency ( conf-spawn ) bigger then 509 will break the compilation. I was hoping to get at least 1000 on that new quad core

Why 509? It seems the number depends on the maximum size of the FD_SET array used for "monitoring" ( using select ) the file descriptors ( connection sockets or opened files ) . This limit is set in FD_SETSIZE constant to 1024. In case you're wondering ... the formula that gets you from 1024 to 509 is (FD_SETSIZE-5)/2 ( from chkspawn.c )

Trying to define FD_SETSIZE to a higher value in conf-cc like this -DFD_SETSIZE=4096 doesn't work because FD_SETSIZE is redefined in sys/select.h like this

#define FD_SETSIZE              __FD_SETSIZE

__FD_SETSIZE is defined somewhere in /usr/include/bits/types.h ( actually typesizes.h ) to 1024. Defining -D__FD_SETSIZE doesn't work either...I even tried both and still no luck.

The Solution

After hours of digging through mail archives and sites I found this mailing list post that really helped:
Re: fd_setsize

If you just want to get it working just download my patch qmail Big Concurrency fix-1.0 (898 bytes) , apply it ( after you apply the big concurrency patch ) , set conf-spawn to something big ( but less then 65000 ) and then you should be able to compile qmail.

If you want to know how it's done, read bellow...

It seems like the solution is to include bits/types.h, undefine __FD_SETSIZE and then define it to a higher value. The author of that post says that this is not a good idea (from the portability point of view, but I don't care about that ) since programs should never directly include bits/types.h ( true ) but the alternative is to modify that system file, again not a good idea since it will be overwritten by a possible update.

My first idea was to just use that code from the mailing list post into the select.h2 , since this is the file used to generate select.h and select.h is included in spawn.c and ckhspawn.c but this didn't work because spawn.c was including "select.h" after "sys/types.h" so even if select.h would define __FD_SETSIZE it would be useless since FD_SETSIZE ( this is the one that really matters ) would have been already defined in sys/types.h .

The solution I found at the time was to just move "select.h" at the top of the file and remove "sys/types.h" since it was already included from select.h but now I realized I could have just as well undefined and defined FD_SETSIZE too inside select.h

And that's the story about how I got to run 1000 concurrent connection in qmail.

The real problem

Now that we can have so much concurrency we hit another wall. Qmail, as most other MTAs, doesn't have any way of controlling the remote concurrency per destination domain.

At 1000 simultaneous connections it's very likely that it would create a few tens or hundreds of connections simultaneously to the same domain.

When this happens that domain will just ban your ip.  So how do we fix this one?

PS: I have an answer but I want to see what you have for a solution so hit the comments...

This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

Qmail Big concurrency

You want the functionality of tail(1) in a php function.

The Solution

Bellow is a php function that gives you the last N lines from a file. It doesn't do everything tail(1) does ( like following, retrying, etc ) but just the basic stuff:

function tail($file, $num_to_get=10)
{
        $fp = fopen($file, 'r');
        $position = filesize($file);
        $chunklen = 4096;
        if($position-$chunklen< =0)fseek($fp,0);
        else    fseek($fp, $position-$chunklen);
        $data="";$ret="";$lc=0;
        while($chunklen > 0)
        {
                $data = fread($fp, $chunklen);
                $dl=strlen($data);
                for($i=$dl-1;$i>=0;$i--){
                        if($data[$i]=="\n"){
                                if($lc==0 && $ret!="")$lc++;
                                $lc++;
                                if($lc>$num_to_get)return $ret;
                        }
                        $ret=$data[$i].$ret;
                }
                if($position-$chunklen< =0){
                        fseek($fp,0);
                        $chunklen=$chunklen-abs($position-$chunklen);
                }else   fseek($fp, $position-$chunklen);
                $position = $position - $chunklen;
        }
        fclose($fp);
        return $ret;
}

It may not be the fastest solution but it works.
Have a better one? Please let me know about it.

This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

php tail

@divinewrite Thanks mate! You have a lot of great info in those articles. in reply to divinewrite #

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This is a post from Mihai Secasiu's PatchLog - Patches 'n Hacks.

This week on twitter 2009-09-06