Treading Water

by

It’s Saturday, and one of my servers is having a conniption fit. The load is like a sine wave between 6 and 12, and it’s trying to do a lot of I/O. This machine is set up as a mail server, optimized for latency and not throughput. It was a mail server, actually, until it turned into a Sophos PureMessage reporting and management machine for the other seven spam and virus filtering machines. The stats from the other machines are stored in a PostgreSQL database, which is pre-installed with newer versions of PureMessage. I’m not quite sure what Sophos is doing under the hood, but this machine suddenly needs to do a lot more I/O, and going from mail server …

Read More

Bad News Jones & The Blend

by

Alas, it’s negative 12 Fahrenheit out right now. My friend Ann wanted to punch Mother Nature on Thursday after we got a foot of snow. I now second that, after needing to jumpstart a friend’s car in the wind chill. It’s actually too cold to snow. Like, WTF. I was thinking that going out tonight was a bad idea. My original plan was foiled by a packed bar, so we progressed into the wind to Montmartre to drink wine and be merry. When I see a band setting up I am usually wary unless I’ve checked it out ahead of time, but we had half a bottle of wine left so it was inevitable that we’d catch part of the …

Read More

B.S.

by

“I value your opinion because you have an even lower tolerance for B.S. than I do.” These are words I never would have guessed I’d hear, especially from a manager.

Fresh Air

by

Today is one of those days where you can tell the transplants from the natives. It’s 53 degrees Fahrenheit, which is an excellent Valentine’s Day present if you ask me. All the natives are walking around with light jackets on, if they have a jacket on at all. As I was walking to my Jeep the girl walking in front of me was removing her coat. Definitely a midwestern woman. All the transplants from warmer climes are still bundled in their puffy down coats. Brrr. The natives are driving around with at least one window down, sometimes with a hand hanging out. The transplants think we’re crazy. The first USENIX conference I attended was in Anaheim in January, 1998. I …

Read More

Law of Charting Complexity

by

Over the weekend I was thinking about my last post about clusters. That is, when I wasn’t discovering that adding Dave’s Insanity Sauce to boiling water makes it airborne, and consequently hard to breathe in the kitchen. I just wanted spicier pasta, not fluid-filled lungs. I haven’t felt like this since I inadvertently made chlorine gas in my parents garage in junior high. Anyhow, I think there’s a deeper thought in that post: “The complexity of a diagram of a system is proportional to the amount of your life that system will waste.” And it is definitely O(n^2) or worse.

When to Cluster, When to Build Big

by

When you’re building a medium-large sized service there’s a fundamental choice you have to make: do you build it on one big machine or do you cluster smaller machines? If you choose a cluster do you make it fewer, bigger machines or a bunch of smaller machines? A cluster is hard. A cluster usually means a shared filesystem. A shared filesystem means a SAN. A shared filesystem usually means an IP-based lock server, which means your network needs to be as reliable as your SAN. It also means that file accesses will be slower. Sometimes a cluster means weirdo stuff like multicast, or things your network guys might not like or understand. You also might need to do heartbeat via …

Read More

links for 2006-02-09

by

PathScale – Compiler Suite (tags: linux compilers) Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer for Linux* (tags: linux performance tuning compilers) Intel® Math Kernel Library – Linpack Benchmark information (tags: linux performance tuning) Inhabitat Light pollution and art (tags: pollution light) IDA’s Model Lighting Ordinance (tags: light pollution)

links for 2006-02-07

by

Nikon D200 Tricks (tags: nikon d200 cameras tricks) New federal rules will make job hunting online trickier – Feb. 6, 2006 (tags: jobs government censorship)

+ More Posts +