Autarchy of the Private Cave

Ukraine is the most dangerous country in Europe. That is, in terms of road safety and driving culture (or, to be more precise, the lack of both).

In 2007 in Ukraine, there were over 62 000 road accidents with over 9 000 killed and 77 000 injured.
This is 20% increase comparing to 2006.
And this is also almost two people dead from road accidents per 10000 of population, and 16(!) people injured per 10000 of population.
Based on these numbers, every Ukrainian is (on average) at 0.16% risk of being injured and at 0.02% risk of being killed in a road accident.

(An increase in the number of new cars sold in 2007 relative to 2006 was 46.1%: from 371000 sold in 2006, up by 171000 to 542000 new cars sold in 2007.)

On average, road kill accidents take 3-8 times more lives in Ukraine, then in other European countries.

If you visit Ukraine – watch out for reckless, drunken, stupid, blind, ignorant drivers and violating, unpredictable, dummy pedestrians.

The further from the Kyiv’s downtown you are – the more watchful you should be.

This post used the numbers from this press-release (in Ukrainian).

Today, setting up a relatively serious (in CPU resources needed) web-system, I ran into a weird problem of python scripts ending prematurely. After some investigation, it looked like any process which uses up more than 20 seconds of CPU time, is automatically killed. To verify this, I wrote an infinite loop in C,

int main () {
unsigned int i;

for (i = 0; i < 2 ; i++ ) { i = 0; } return 0; } [/c] compiled it and executed several times on the GoDaddy shared hosting server. I did observe the program running for the maximum of 20 seconds of CPU time, not a second more. Please note, that 20 seconds of CPU time can be much more of “real” time, if the script isn’t using 100% of CPU, which often the case for shared hosting. Thus if you have in your php.ini max_execution_time set to, say, 60 seconds, your php script may actually execute as long as one minute; but I’m pretty sure that if your script has lots of CPU-intensive procedures, then as soon as it uses 20 seconds of CPU time, it will be terminated (however, this statement still needs checking – anyone?). To verify, I also created a cron job with the same file. It ran for 30 seconds CPU time. Strangely, this behaviour is not documented anywhere. This limit may also explain a number of other problems, if you have heavy web-applications: they just might be killed before they are finished, causing errors. I do understand the reason for this limitation, and am sure similar limitations exist in other shared hosting environments. The only important thing here is that this limit should have been documented and even put upfront somewhere in the hosting plans descriptions. I also wonder if the limit is the same for all godaddy shared hosting plans, or if it differs. 20 seconds when executed from PHP, and 30 seconds when executed as a cron job were observed on the Deluxe Linux Hosting plan. Extensions, additions and comments are welcome.