While working on some alerting and metric collection about our infrastructure at Bitmovin I wanted to test out if the alerts I configured are actually triggered when a server experiences high CPU load.

I came across this beautiful Stackoverflow Answer that did exactly what I needed:

seq 3 | xargs -P0 -n1 md5sum /dev/zero

This command will saturate 3 cores with 100% user load until you cancel the command with CRTL+C.

Today I took a day off from work so as always when I try some new stuff I end up spending 2 hours on my Vim configuration before actually getting something done. So todays two hours where spent on getting Vim compiled with python3 support.

First off - do use Vim8 - it's awesome and do compile it from source. It's rather simple and saves you from outdated packages on Ubuntu :).

Now my issue today was that I tried enabling python2 and python3 support at the same time. For no apparent reason the following configuration did always result in a vim binary that thought it had python support - but didn't.

./configure --with-features=huge \
            --enable-multibyte \
            --enable-rubyinterp=yes \
            --enable-pythoninterp=yes \
            --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config-x86_64-linux-gnu \
            --enable-python3interp=yes \
            --with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.5/config-3.5m-x86_64-linux-gnu \
            --enable-perlinterp=yes \
            --enable-luainterp=yes \
            --enable-cscope --prefix=/usr \
--enable-fail-if-missing

Running vim --version resulted in +python/dyn and +python3/dyn so I thought - cool it's working.. Until I started vim and was greeted by:

Sorry, this command is disabled, the Python library could not be loaded.

To make things more interesting :echo has('python') did return 0 too - although the Vim was built with python support (and --enable-fail-if-missing is supposed to fail if python can't be linked).

So after trying around a bit and not getting anywhere I decided to just remove the python3 support from the configure line and voila - python is statically linked and working.. Yay!

./configure --with-features=huge \
            --enable-multibyte \
            --enable-rubyinterp=yes \
            --enable-pythoninterp=yes \
            --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config-x86_64-linux-gnu \
            --enable-perlinterp=yes \
            --enable-luainterp=yes \
            --enable-cscope --prefix=/usr \
--enable-fail-if-missing