Testing on Luther Monson

A 1 TB Test: Building a Memory Watchdog for go test

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:48:00 -0700

On August 16th a server.test.exe from shipmates climbed to roughly 1 TB of commit charge on my Windows workstation. Windows Terminal was hosting several agent sessions in tabs. It hard-faulted with E_OUTOFMEMORY, and every one of those sessions died at the same moment. It wasn’t the first time either. An earlier one hit about 236 GB through an infinite filepath.Dir loop.

The machine has 128 GB of RAM. Commit charge doesn’t care. It’s backed by the page file, and Windows will happily let a process reserve-and-commit until the commit limit is gone. Then everything else on the desktop starts failing allocations too.

Making ephpm php Byte-for-Byte Indistinguishable From php-cli

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:25:00 -0700

ePHPm embeds PHP into a single Rust binary. The obvious follow-up question from anybody deploying it is “do I still need a php on the box?” Composer, WP-CLI, artisan, PHPUnit and every build script in the world call php. If ephpm php can stand in for it then the answer is no. The single binary really means a single binary. “Mostly works” isn’t good enough for that though. These tools parse PHP’s output, check its exit codes and re-invoke it. So the goal was simple to state: ephpm php should be indistinguishable from php-cli.

Maintaining a Go Tool That Edits /etc/hosts on Every OS

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:22:00 -0700

Editing the hosts file sounds like the most boring problem in software. Read a text file, add a line, write it back. Then you find out your binary is being shelled out to from a Ruby Vagrant plugin on a Windows laptop with UAC prompts. Your library is being called in a loop by ddev. And every hosts file you parse was hand-edited by somebody at some point. I’ve been maintaining goodhosts for a few years now. I just spent a chunk of the fall and the holidays on it, so here’s what that looks like.