Re: [xml] libxml2 API crazy?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 11:10:46AM -0700, Eric S. Eberhard wrote:
[...]
> So they paid a nice young man to replace my server with a JAVA server
> (why do people feel compelled to replace working programs I'll never know
> -- guess the new IT person had to feel important).  JAVA has built-in XML
> and TCP/IP and it was so "easy" to program, yack yack ... it also fell
> to it's knees at volumes that would be about 10,000 documents per day
> if it did not crash and burn when the load got high.  That is less than
> 1/2% of what my libxml2 server can process.  This, of course, led to AIX
> trashing and the IT guy wanted a room full of Linux boxes with server
> load balancing and all kinds of things.  Fortunately sanity prevailed
> and the new IT guys is gone.  The cheap little AIX box purrs doing all
> that work (and running the order desk, inventory, warehouse, shipping,
> credit, accounting -- all in real time all on one little box) ...

  Well I'm sure you too got similar story 20 years ago but with
ASM or FORTRAN instead of C, some kind of mainframe instead of AIX,
etc :-) . What we wrote will be obsolete sometimes. My own personal
goal when I code is make sure the code will stay around for long,
mothing depresses me as much as my code going to the trash (which
happened a few times, and one of the reason why I do only Open Source
code). But admitedly this is against a global economic trend, stuff
is being designed to be wasted, replaced unresonably soon, and
unfortunately that's true for code too even if it's so damn hard to
get out and running.
  That's why I actually love Linux, there is no constraints put into
the code to make it suitable only to a timeframe, a platform, or
any specific use.

  Sorry for going from the anecdotic to philosophic, but that thread was
already diverging :-)

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Open Source and Standards, Red Hat
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/