Ramblings

I wrote a blog entry about brew, phpenv and keeping updates happy. Five years later, back to it, but with a few changes.

Composer has changed all of our lives. Okay, well, that's a simplification and obvious over-generalization… but if you're reading this rambling, then you probably deal with Drupal at some level and know what I mean.

Drupal has jumped onboard with this method and has been able to move away from keeping everything updated internally and letting external contributed composer packages take care of themselves. This has led to wonderful shortcuts like:

Homebrew is how I tend to manage all of my local packages. It works great for me and gives me the flexibility of installing my own packages without the complexity and overhead of a system like Boxen which I used for a couple of years and had a great love/hate relationship trying to learn all about it. But it turned out in the long run to be just a bit too much effort for the return.

Upgrade

So, I went ahead and upgraded to Sierra yesterday. A few folks had attempted to upgrade and had not had too many issues, so I went with it. Very smooth update for the most part, the machine had to reboot a couple of times before I felt like it was done, but that's fine.

One thing that did change, however, was the lack of my Keychain enabled private keys to be loaded into my ssh-agent when the computer rebooted.

I received an email the other day with the subject "Mollom's volume limit exceeded". Now, I work with the fine folks from Mollom and popped over to ask what was up? I have this blog and it's not all that crazy popular in terms of hits or probably even spam attempts, I do get spam that I have to clear out, but since I enabled Mollom two years ago, it has blocked 160K+ spam attempts… Mollom's free subscription for personal blogs is great and the spam that it auto blocks is not counted against you. So this volume limit should only be for "legitimate" comments and you're allowed 50 per day.

It seems like such a simple piece of code.

variable_set('myvar', 'thevalue');

But it can bring your site to its knees very quickly when used too much.

Overquerying

Recently on a few sites, when they are experiencing extreme slowness or throwing 503 errors we have found a single problem, variable_set();. Trying to trace the issues back, using tools like mytop we see that there are lots of slow queries and many, many queries of: