Slow git review uploads?

jeblair was kind enough to help me debug my problem with slow “git review” uploads for Openstack projects just now. It turns out that part of my standard configuration for ssh is to enable ControlMaster and ControlPersist. I mostly do this because the machines I use at Canonical are a very long way away from my home in Australia, and its nice to have slightly faster connections when you ssh to a machine. However, gerrit is incompatible with these options as best as we can tell.

So, if your git reviews are taking 10 to 20 minutes to upload like mine were, check that you’re not using persistent connections. Excluding review.openstack.org from that part of my configuration has made a massive difference to the speed of uploads for me.

Twisted conch

It seems to me that every time I go to write some networking code in Python, the twisted guys have got there before me. Today’s adventures are involving twisted conch, which seems very cool. The documentation is a bit patchy though.

clusterssh

For reasons which might be fairly obvious, I’ve been doing a lot of repetitive sshing to machines recently (think executing the same upgrade on four mail servers for instance). I pondered aloud in the cube the possibility of an application which would give me a dialog to type in, and then wack that text into a bunch of xterms all at the same time for me. Andrew did some Debian foo and suddenly cluster ssh is presented as an option. It’s pretty cool, and basically does exactly what I wanted.

It’s not perfect though — some people have complained that it uses gnome-terminal, and about the fonts of all things. I’ve noticed some odd behaviour if you try to cut and paste into the gnome-terminal as well (instead of the text entry dialog). Interesting, I think it might be time for me and the cluster ssh code to become acquainted sometime.