Monthly Archives: March 2007

ICHicanery8

Posted by on March 9, 2007 47 comments

Or: How to install Windows XP on a SATA hard drive attached to an Intel ICH8 SATA controller in AHCI mode.

I, like many people, have an Asus P5B motherboard, the non-Deluxe model. It’s been a pretty good board for me so far, and I’m pleased with its feature set for the price I paid. It’s got the Intel P965 Express chipset, which features the ICH8 Serial ATA controller, not the ICH8R model that its bigger Deluxe brother has. Apparently Intel has decided not to release drivers for Windows XP that support running the regular ICH8 in AHCI mode. AHCI supposedly gives better performance and enables more features in supported SATA drives, and so it’s kind of a feature I want. But try as I might, I couldn’t get any of the drivers that Intel has on their Download Center to work with XP and my board — they all claim to only support the ICH8R and not the vanilla, non-RAID-supporting ICH8. So I did what any good geek would do in a situation like this: I Googled.

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Thoughts on Rails Performance

Posted by on March 6, 2007 1 comment
  • 2007-03-07: Added results for testing with Mongrel and the ActiveRecord session store using MyISAM tables.

As many of you know I’m a rather big fan of Ruby on Rails, the web application development framework. I adore Ruby as a language for all sorts of tasks, and I’ve found I’m able to get a great deal of work done very quickly with Rails and its approach to web application design. I’m not alone in theUpdated se beliefs, too, as the Rails community grew rapidly, and the software has many fans.

One of its “Achilles’ heels,” however, is performance. The Rails framework is very large, Ruby’s performance tends to lag behind that of other common web languages (at least, in Ruby 1.8; 2.0 is going to bring us an entirely new interpreter with significant performance boosts), and the recommendations from the community for significantly boosting performance tend to largely sound similar to “cache it!” It’s all a trade-off, just like everything in technology and life, however — what costs you incur in actual request-per-second performance tend to easily be made up for in improved developer productivity and happiness. The value for not having to bang your head against a wall dealing with JSP/Servlets or PHP and its abundance of code-in-view SQL is significant.

But I was curious just what kind of performance we were talking about. Read more »