Featured articles
DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer
Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System
Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives
Recent Posts
ZFS and caching for performance
I’ve recently been experimenting with ZFS in a production environment, and have discovered some very interesting performance characteristics. I have seen many benchmarks indicating that for general usage, ZFS should be at least as fast if not faster than UFS (directio not withstanding - not that UFS directio itself is any faster, but anything that does it’s own memory management such as InnoDB or Oracle will suffer from the double-buffering effect unless ZFS has been tuned...
Apache mod_proxy balancing with PHP sticky sessions
I’ve been investigating the new improved mod_proxy in Apache 2.2.x for use in our new production environment, and in particular the built-in load balancing support. It was always possible to build a load-balanced proxy server with Apache before, using some mod_rewrite voodoo, but having a whole set of directives that do all the hard work for you is a great feature. There is however, a catch. It won’t work out of the box with PHP sessions, or many other applications. I’ve ...
Sun V240 to X4100 : AMD vs SPARC
At work, we just migrated a database server from a Sun Fire V240 to a Sun X4100. This makes it the first AMD64 system we’ve put into production, and the performance advantage is staggering. I could post the benchmarks and various statistics, but I believe the following graphs from the cut-over paint a far more interesting and convincing argument for the price/performance benefit of Sun’s AMD64 offerings…
PHP 4.4.3 packages now in testing
Blastwave PHP4 packages are available in /testing. These bump PHP4 up to 4.4.3, which is primarily a bug fix and security upgrade. It also fixes an issue with the packaging of the current 4.4.2 packages, which resulted in a non-working PEAR installation due to an error in the upstream source tarball. <p />I hope to get these packages released to unstable in the next few days - I’ve been running them for a few days here and there appears to be no issues, but as always...
LigHTTPd and Apache - Symfony benchmarks
At work, we’re developing a brand new in-house CMS based on the Symfony framework. As it uses no mod_rewrite rules or other Apache dependencies and is a "clean break" for us, I figured it would be an ideal candidate for benchmarking under LigHTTPd, comparing it to Apache 2.2 in order to give me some statistics to compliment my last blog entry on the subject. The results from the "ab" Apache-benchmark tool are pretty stunning - although I’m still at a loss as to explain ju...