Wednesday, June 30, 2004 - Posts
The company I work for sells a shrink-wrapped webserver/sql server application. I've worked with a couple customers who are having performance problems with our application and it amazes me all the other IIS applications they have running on the same box. In one situation, the company is running a Java-based application that routinely consumes 450MB of memory in 4 processes. Our application rarely takes more than 50MB, but it gets starved for CPU cycles and memory. It's hilarious when they come to us complaining our application is slow. I ask them, “are the other applications running slow.” To which they respond “yes” - and yet they decide not to understand the concept of a single processor as a constraint in this situation. I am almost to the point where I want to drive the aspnet_wp process priority up to real-time, do some static memory grabbing in startup and choke the other applications out completely. Granted, we aren't dealing with fortune 100 firms with dedicated IT staffs, but come on! These people are hired as IT professionals. One company agreed to move us to a dedicated server and installed us on their Domain Controller! I kid you not! I'm not making this stuff up! After slowly counting to 10 and letting rational thoughts back in, we are getting to the point I believe we should contractually require a dedicated server for support purposes. No dedicated server, no support.
I think people deploy Windows Server OSs with a different mentality than they have with other servers. Why is this? This mentality has been around for years. It's similar to the user who complains their computer is so slow, and then you find it takes five minutes to load everything in the Add/Remove Programs dialog box.
I would hope there would be a better way than doing this contractually, but I just don't see any other way from where I stand.
I'm toying around with a graphical game app I wrote a couple years ago in VB. The game is sort of a tetris/bubble-style game and everyone I've given the game to gets caught up in it. I've resurrected the app since I ordered the book “Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start“ that I blogged about earlier.
Then a thought hit me. What if I made the game a library that throws up a form and allows the game to be played. People could take the library and put it in their apps as an easter egg. I could control the amount of customization (naming, functions available, etc.) throught the class interface. I was thinking about adding some animations using DirectX, but maybe I'd keep it a simple GDI+ based drawing application to keep runtime requirements absolutely minimized.
I think this would be kind of cool, or is that just me? Does anyone know of people who currently provide easter egg apps?
The book Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start: Graphics and Game Programming by Tom Miller showed up yesterday. This is really a fun read for me, I won't be using DirectX in my current position - it's just something I've wanted to learn.
I'm not a game programmer or 3d graphics expert (by a long shot), but I've done a lot of 2d graphics work in the past using the GDI and GDI+. So far the book is a fun read and good resource. I spent some time last night reading the book and I've found he does a nice job of explaining the setup, code and parameters. I've always found the setup to be the most confusing portion of DirectX and he does a nice job of sorting it out.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.