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Author: david
Mea Culpa
Open CPU surgery
I don’t talk much about my dark early days in technology, but lets just say that I know my way around a soldering iron and I remember a time when the only reason you needed heatsink compound was on a TO-3 style power transistor (and it was white and came pre-slathered over a piece of mica).
So anyway, hardware innards and I have a pretty good relationship. However, having established that, I’m still pretty intimidated with cracking open my MacBook Pro. I mean what right minded individual would relish the idea of spending a stressfull hour trying to remember where all the screws go (and whether you’ve reconnected all of those fiddly microscopic connectors, and the urine coloured celephane tape, my god the horror).
Still, this whole “I’m too hot, shutting down now!” thing was driving me batty. I’ve been hobbling along using Fan Control and turning off one CPU on tasks I knew would take it to the brink, but I finally had enough.
Since the MacBook is my primary computer, I can’t afford send it away to Apple for a week when I can re-goop the cpu myself in an hour. So I pulled out the handy tube of Arctic Silver 5, grabbed a bottle of 99% Isopropyl alcohol, Q-tips, and my jewelers screwdrivers and went to work.
With the help of some decent instructions the dis- and re-assembly wasn’t too hard. And the difference has been pronounced. Just watching Fan Control is quite exciting. The CPU gets hot, the fans rev up, the cpu cools down.
I’m pleased. It’s a nice change from the CPU gets hot, the fans rev up, the CPU gets hotter, the book shuts down.
Web Performance Cache I Hates You!
Apache in OS X Server has a feature1 called the web performance cache which is the bane of my existence. It has limited use (mostly for large volume static sites) but it is enabled by default for every new site you create, and enabling it for just one site can effect the behavior of every site on the box.
Invariably someone creates a new site on one of our servers and fails to disable the perf cache. Bad things ensue. I get grumpy.
Server Admin makes it difficult to discover which of the 100 or so sites on our primary web servers have the the perf cache enabled (click-click, options, close, click-click, options, close… sigh). Thankfully there is another way. Fire up the terminal and type:
cat /etc/webperfcache/webperfcache.conf
This command will list the contents of the webperfcache.conf file. Any sites listed will have the perf cache enabled. Turn it off, I beg you.
1 This “feature” has cost me more time than a zillion years worth of performance benefit.
Aw (maybe) nuts!
Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch has announced the dates for C4[1] (August 10-12). Unfortunately we leave for summer vacation that weekend so I won’t be able to make it.
Bummer.
It was an outstanding event last year and I was really looking forward to attending again.
Update: Maybe not so bleak, there might be a way…