Year: 2015

NAS Performance: NFS vs Samba vs GlusterFS

I came across this question and also found the results of the benchmarks somewhat surprising.

  • GlusterFS replicated 2: 32-35 seconds, high CPU load
  • GlusterFS single: 14-16 seconds, high CPU load
  • GlusterFS + NFS client: 16-19 seconds, high CPU load
  • NFS kernel server + NFS client (sync): 32-36 seconds, very low CPU load
  • NFS kernel server + NFS client (async): 3-4 seconds, very low CPU load
  • Samba: 4-7 seconds, medium CPU load
  • Direct disk: < 1 second

The post is from 2012, so I’m curious if this is still accurate. Has anybody tried this? Can confirm or otherwise?

Also, an interesting note from the answer to the above:

From what I’ve seen after a couple of packet captures, the SMB protocol can be chatty, but the latest version of Samba implements SMB2 which can both issue multiple commands with one packet, and issue multiple commands while waiting for an ACK from the last command to come back. This has vastly improved its speed, at least in my experience, and I know I was shocked the first time I saw the speed difference too – Troubleshooting Network Speeds — The Age Old Inquiry

 

How Far Can You Go With HAProxy and a t2.micro

Here’s an interesting set of experiments trying to answer the question of how far can you go with HAProxy setup on the smallest of the Amazon EC2 instances – t2.micro (1 virtual CPU, 1 GB of RAM).  Here’s the summary.

460 requests/second

At 460 req/second response times are mostly a flat ~300 ms, except for two spikes. I attribute this to TCP congestion avoidance as the traffic approaches the limit and packets start to get dropped. After dropped packets are detected the clients reduce their transmission rate, but eventually the transmission rate stabilizes again just under the limit. Only 1739 requests timeout and 134918 succeed.

[…]

It seems that the limit of the t2.micro is around 500 req/second even for small responses.

Random fonts and colors for each WordPress blog post

Here is an interesting web design idea that adds uniqueness to the website : use a random font for post titles, and use random color schemes for each post.   To hell with consistency you say?  Well, apparently, being random is being consistent too.

Picked up the thought from this blog post.

Screenshots from developers : 2002 vs. 2015

Here is a nice collection of screenshots (with some comments) from some really hardcore developers – people who are behind things like operating systems and programming languages, not the latest hipster startup that nobody will remember n three years.  Better even, the screenshots were taken in 2002 and now, 13 years later, reiterated.

desktop_bwk_2015 Two things I found interesting here:

  1. Pretty much everyone calls their setup “boring”, yet it’s obviously slow functional that very little changes over time.
  2. Some of these screenshots feature setups so basic, that for those people who are not too familiar with the applications used, it would be difficult to choose which screenshot is from 2002 and which one is from 2015.

And while I’m nowhere near that level of developer, I still have to say that my desktop hasn’t changed much in the last 13 years either.  I am spending my days in the MATE Desktop Environment, which is a fork of Gnome to maintain the awesome Gnome 2 interface and not all that craziness of Gnome 3.  And like many other people featured here, I mostly use the browser and a gadzillion of terminal windows for my work.  I also have Vim keybindings burnt into my fingers, and I can’t imagine switching to something else ever.  Here’s how it looks today.

desktop

I’m sure there must be a screenshot of my desktop from back in the days somewhere on this blog, but I don’t think I’ll find it.