BSD Portsssg 1.8.76: the same speed, less memory, three workarounds fewer
The site moved to ssg 1.8.76. The build of 110,689 pages takes as long as it did, about 250 seconds, with 5% less memory, and three bugs found here are fixed.
This site is built by ssg, and since tonight's refresh by version 1.8.76. Was it faster? Not measurably. It used less memory, and it fixed three bugs this site had found and worked around, which mattered more.
Time: within the noise
The server rebuilds all 110,689 pages on every refresh, and the stats page records each build. Four builds on 1.8.74 took 245 to 253 seconds; the first on 1.8.76 took 249.
Builds on the same version already differ by eight seconds, so one build four seconds under the average says nothing yet. On a workstation the same build went from 2 min 21 s to 2 min 10 s, but that is one run each on a machine doing other work. If 1.8.76 is faster, the next days of refreshes on the stats page will show it; one run does not.
Memory: about 5% less
The peak memory of the build moved, on the server and on the workstation alike:
From 6.11–6.20 GB to 5.83 GB on the server, from 5.64 to 5.35 GB on the workstation: about 300 MB less, below the spread of the old runs and in the same direction in both places. For a build that has to fit beside a search engine holding 2.4 GB, that is the useful part.
Three bugs fewer
1.8.75 and 1.8.76 fixed three bugs reported from this site the same day they were found. Each had a workaround here; each workaround is gone:
| Bug | What it did here | Workaround, now removed |
|---|---|---|
| #342 | the build report build.json was written readable by its owner only, and the web server answered 403 |
a chmod over every published copy |
| #344 | a taxonomy mapped to maintainerTerm also read the raw maintainer, so [email protected] stopped the build |
field: maintainerTerm in the configuration |
| #346 | two pages at one address overwrote each other without a word: the stats page lost its address to FreeBSD's benchmarks category |
none possible in ssg; the stats page moved to /stats/ |
The last one is worth a sentence more. A page that silently vanishes is found only by someone who goes looking for it, and here someone did: the menu said Benchmarks and the page showed FreeBSD's benchmarking tools. ssg now stops the build when two documents claim one address and names both. The data tool behind this site keeps its own check as well, because it can fail in seconds, before the search engine is loaded and before the four-minute build starts.