Gate One Brings Text-mode Surfing To the Web, Quake-Style

Riskable writes "As a follow-up to my previous Slashdot story, Gate One is now out of beta. Packages can be downloaded here. There's also a live demo: press the ESC key on this page to have a terminal running lynx drop into view, Quake-style! I've also posted a video overview and the documentation can be found here. Some pertinent changes since the beta: Added the ability display images inline within terminals, key-based SSH authentication, a WebSockets authentication API (for secure embedding), dramatically improved terminal emulation, an overhauled bookmark manager, support for international keyboard layouts, and a web-based log viewer that lets you export logs to self-contained HTML playback files."

Comments

Servers ran out of memory

[Riskable]

LOL, that'll teach me to use Rackspace's cheap servers. Setting up new ones now with more memory... Should start working again in a bit.

Re:Servers ran out of memory

[nman64]

You've obviously never pitted Slashdot against a cheap VPS. Even serving static files, the traffic of a good slashdotting will bring a lightweight server to its knees, and this is a story related to SSH.

Re:Servers ran out of memory

[Riskable]

You're right: The four webservers I setup to serve liftoffsoftware.com are barely breaking a sweat right now. Load average on all of them is about 0.02. It is low enough that I'll be taking one or two of them offline I think (why pay for what I don't need?). I also want to mention that I *did* tune them considerably and even modified the Drupal theme to serve up many of the static files via a CDN.

It is the Gate One servers that needed the beefy resources since each open terminal needs to take up enough memory to be stored/kept track of inside of the Python interpreter. 90% of the load there (from a Slashdotting) is memory and I can't believe I didn't foresee this. Lesson learned.

Having said all that I believe I went way overboard by setting up four 4096MB Gate One servers. Here's the line from 'top' on one of the Gate One servers right now (as I'm being slashdotted):

1203 1165 3:51.43 36 5.3 20 0 S 980m 768m 211m 0 python ./gateone.py

That's with Google Analytics showing ~400 users on the site right now.

5.3% memory utilization is nothing and as long as everyone doesn't stick around surfing the web all day in text mode that number will probably never rise above 10%. I'll be watching it and likely be swapping these servers out with 1GB ones. I love on-demand cloud hosting!

Slashvertishment

[monjemono]

As this looks like advertishment to me, I will post about my own UNIX web terminal emulator. Its C, executable only 100kb for the executable with everything contained, and many of the goodies from GateOne (multiple sessions, session attached to user, not browser window...) It also even has colaborative terminal, where two users can attach to the same terminal. All AGPLv3. https://github.com/davidmoreno/onion/tree/master/examples/oterm

Re:From the Homepage

[nman64]

Not at all contradictory. It does not require the use of browser plugins, but the Gate One application supports its own plugins for customization.

Re: Oh Timmy...

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "slashvertisement" you mean "submission by a very long term (5 digit UID) slashdot regular about an open source project he created that many slashdotters are interested in", then yes, "Timmy" is getting pretty heavy on those.

Re:Bravo from the ajaxterm author

[Riskable]

THANK YOU SIR! It was AjaxTerm that lead me to develop Escape From The Web which was an HTTP streams-based predecessor to Gate One. If it weren't for AjaxTerm's example of how to write such an application I probably would've never gotten around to making Gate One.

So thanks again; Gate One wouldn't have been possible if you never shared your code.