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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 as a volume manager

While browsing the ZFS man page recently, I made an interesting discovery: ZFS can export block devices from a zpool, which means you can separate "ZFS the volume manager" from "ZFS the filesystem". This may well be old news to many; however I haven’t seen many references to this on the web, so thought I’d post a quick blog update.

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...