Make Meaningful Measurements
Mar 21,
2016
You never know what something will lead to. I took a quantitative analysis chemistry course back in my undergrad days at Purdue University. Had to take it, I should say. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I needed a course with associated laboratory session from the science side of the school, as opposed to engineering. […]
Performance Tuning on Virtual Machines
Feb 29,
2016
The qcow2 virtual disk format uses copy-on-write to delay allocation of storage until it is needed, reducing the amount of disk space used. It can use Zlib compression to further save space. Last week I showed you an example of a virtual machine with a 16 GB disk with 2.7 GB in use on its […]
Avoid Fragmentation: Newer is Better
Nov 25,
2015
File system fragmentation sounds like a dreary topic, but nothing is as tedious as waiting for a sluggish system. Because the disks are the slowest components in the system by a large margin, careful attention to file system layout and fragmentation reduction can yield large gains. “Newer is Better” in several ways, let’s look at […]
More Unexpected Applications of grep
Nov 6,
2015
Quentin Tarantino said “I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homages.” He stole that from Pablo Picasso, who said “When there’s anything to steal, I steal,” and “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In that frame of mind, let’s see a very elegant use of grep that, believe it or not, I […]
Linux Virtualization Part 2: Package and Ship Your Linux Applications with Containers and Docker
Sep 28,
2015
Last week, I gave you an overview of the spectrum of Linux virtualization technologies – Part 1: Linux Virtualization, and explained the simplest and highest-performance end. The problem with doing everything with chroot is that it takes a lot of work to set things up and there is only limited separation between the virtualized environment […]