Tag: performance tuning

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]