Performance anti-patterns

"This list of performance anti-patterns is by no means complete; however, being familiar with those issues that have made our work more challenging should help others avoid them—or at least recognize them more quickly. Although not all of our projects may have the performance resources we might like, avoiding these anti-patterns will make even those limited resources that much more effective. Remember, the performance work done at the beginning of the project in terms of benchmark, algorithm, and data-structure selection will pay tremendous dividends later on—enough, perhaps, to allow you to avoid that traditional performance fire drill at the end."

Read more.

NetApp Creative Marketing

We've been used to to ocasionally see sponsored tests of competition products, but it's very rare to actually see one vendor submitting benchmarks for it's competitor. Is this benchmark fair? :)
NetApp vs. EMC.

Vanity Naming

"The Nemo Unification and Vanity Naming component of project Clearview has integrated into OpenSolaris build 83, which (among other things) allows administrators to give meaningful names to network datalink interfaces, including VLAN interfaces."

Read More.

Intel is looking for people to work on Open Solaris

There's a new opensolaris-jobs discussion list. One of the first postings is from Intel looking for experienced developers to work on Open Solaris.

Nexenta Upgrades with ZFS

Nexenta upgrades using ZFS explained here.

Apple hiding from users

Apple ported DTrace to MacOS some time ago. This is very good for everyone. However one would be surprised if wanted to instrument iTunes (and perhaps more applications) - you can't by default as they changed dtrace code so you can't measure some applications.

From Adam's post:

"Which started me thinking... did they? Surely not. They wouldn't disable DTrace for certain applications. [...] But that's exactly what Apple's done with their DTrace implementation."

MySQL + ZFS - Backup Tool

Digitar is releasing script they developed internally to do quick&easy MySQL backups utilizing ZFS snapshots. You can read more about the tool and even download it here.

Sun to Acquire MySQL AB

From official announcement:

SANTA CLARA, CA January 16, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Jonathan's blog entry and another interesting one.

Just a thought: Solaris (free) + Sun Cluster (free) + MySQL (free) on x86 or Niagara servers.

Nexenta CP RC2

Nexenta Core Platform RC2 is available.

Release highlights:

• OpenSolaris build 80+ (non-debug)

• Project integration: NWS, AVS, COMSTAR, in-kernel CIFS client
• apt-clone: ZFS-integrated safe upgrade via remote APT repository. Support for in-place (live) and safe upgrades
• Installer: multiple improvements
• Nexenta Zones: multiple improvements. Integrated automatic Zone upgrades
• Started using conventional Debian development cycle

• New web site, moved to http://www.nexenta.org

Tuning IO

Interesting blog entry.

3-D Head System

That's really cool! It looks easy and cheap enough to build that one wonders why it's not on the market yet!

Sun's support

Sun's support is the best one from all vendors I have had a pleasure to interact with. However when it comes to OSC it's one of the worst. First you can't even log-in on regular basis your session just time outs. Then if you are lucky and you log-in it's so sloooooooow most of the time, you experience regular time-outs and you've got to wait dozen of seconds to refresh a page. Then even if it works it's functionality is limited - why can't I attach any file to the case? I do I have to send it later vie email directly to assigned engineer who will attached to a case or I have to use separate ftp site and put file names in a case. Of course that ftp site is also slooooooow - uploading bigger crashdump takes many hours, sometimes even more. Then description field is limited to 28KB - so if you want to put some more command output or log files you have to do above (send an email later or upload to ftp site and provide file names) or split it and put as another 28KB as an update to a case. Once you put everything in your case and you mark that you want to be notified of all changes in a case - why should you get 3 emails each time? Then there are other less frustrating problems (comparing to above) with OSC. I'm talking about some problems lately - I'm talking about my experience for a last couple of years (or more more).

Remember - it's a service for a paid customers! It doesn't matter if you have basic plan or platinum subscription - you get the same OSC. Some changes were promised last summer - nothing happened.
To me and to many others OSC is a really discouraging experience.

I know that everyone has got used to it, but we're in a 2008 and we're talking about the company who is proud to be innovative and ahead of competition - and they have a right to be proud because they really are innovative and ahead of competition in many cases. It's time Sun put some more thought to OSC now and bring it to 21st century.

Niagara-2 vs. Power6

Interesting observation:

"Siebel is one of the epidemic applications in the enterprise. Look in any company of a certain size and you find Siebel or a similar application. Customer Relationship Management was one of the big hype topics a few years ago. Thus benchmarks for this application are really important for server vendors.

When you dig around in the benchmark whitepapers for Siebel, you will find a really interesting gem of information: You can outperform three IBM p570 p6 4,7 GHz with two Sun Sparc Enterprise T5120 and two T5220.

According to the the benchmarking document from Oracle and IBM a configuration consisting out of one 8-proc p570, one 4-proc p570 and one 2-proc p570 was benchmarked. This configuration was able to serve 7000 users with a rate of 106,157 business transactions per hour. A few days ago Oracle certified the benchmark for our UltraSPARC T2 base servers. According to this document, a configuration consisting out of 4 systems with one UltraSPARC T2 each was able to serve 10000 users with a rate of 142,061 business transactions per hour.

I want to add some perspective to this result: The result is especially interesting, as the IBM Power6 based configuration is vastly more expensive than the one based on UltraSPARC T2. The capabilties of the T2 are really amazing."

[highlights introduced by me]

Update: more details

Lets dtrace /bin/sh

DTrace Provider for Bourne Shell.

ZFS on OS X

Official site for ZFS on OS X. Also check ZFS Ports site.

Memcached

Memcached has been integrated into Open Solaris.

2008 Technology of the Year Awards: Platforms

I have three links for you: 1 2 3