Just another Swedish programming sysadmin person.
Coffee is always the answer.

And beware my spaghet.

  • 37 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle






  • In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
    I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.

    We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.






  • Go has a heavy focus on simplicity and ease-of-use by hiding away complexity through abstractions, something that makes it an excellent language for getting to the minimum-viable-product point. Which I definitely applaud it for, it can be a true joy to code an initial implementation in it.

    The issue with hiding complexity like such is when you reach the limit of the provided abstractions, something that will inevitably happen when your project reaches a certain size. For many languages (like C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc) there’s an option to - at that point - skip the abstractions and instead code directly against the underlying layers, but Go doesn’t actually have that option.
    One result of this is that many enterprise-sized Go projects have had to - in pure desperation - hire the people who designed Go in the first place, just to get the necessary expertice to be able to continue development.

    Here’s one example in the form of a blog - with some examples of where hidden complexity can cause issues in the longer term; https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride





  • What is truly bloated is their network-install images, starting with a 14MB kernel and 65MB initrd, which then proceeds to pull a 2.5GB image which they unpack into RAM to run the install.

    This is especially egregious when running thin VMs for lots of things, since you now require them to have at least 4GB of RAM simply to be able to launch the installer at all.

    Compare this to regular Debian, which uses an 8MB kernel and a 40MB initrd for the entire installer.
    Or some larger like AlmaLinux, which has a 13MB kernel and a 98MB initrd, and which also pulls a 900MB image for the installer. (Which does mean a 2GB RAM minimum, but is still almost a third of the size of Ubuntu)



  • I’ve been hoping to find a non-PHP alternative to Nextcloud for a while, but unfortunately I’ve yet to find one which supports my base requirements for the file storage.

    Due to some quirks with my setup, my backing storage consists of a mix of local folders, S3 buckets, SMB/SFTP mounts (with user credential login), and even an external WebDav server.
    Nextcloud does manage such a thing phenomenally, while all the alternatives I’ve tested (including a Radicale backed by rclone mounts) tend to fall completely to pieces as soon as more than one storage backend ends up getting involved, especially when some of said backends need to be accessed with user-specific credentials.













  • You could also just run IMAP/JMAP/SMTP as separate components, I can’t see any place in the Stalwart documentation - or in the Docker image itself - where monolith is the only option.

    I haven’t tested the setup myself yet, but me and another root are planning on testing a setup of Stalwart to replace a semi-broken IMAP/JMAP setup for a computer club, keeping the SMTP as is.