c0t0d0s0.org

Also mittlerweile glaube ich an einen Hardwareschaden. Auch mit Debian 4.0 steigt hier in unregemässigen Abständen iowait auf 90% und load auf 150 bis 200. Und ich habe nicht den Hauch einer Idee, was es noch sein koennte. Raaehbaeh. Ich will VTS, ich will Dtrace, ich will Solaris.

Ich musste heute ohne weitere Vorwarnung leider das komplette System neu aufsetzen. Bis zur vollständigen Wiederherstellung kann es noch dauern.

Many people think of Linux as real-time unix. Or about hard real time operating systems like vxworks. Not so many people know: The plain Solaris is a really capable real-time operating system, too. James Litchfield made some interesting latency tests to quantify the the RT capabilities of Solaris. And in the light of this results: It plays in the same ballpark as hard-RT operating systems with overall reaction times of 4 microseconds at average and 32 microseconds worst case.
(via: Marc Hamilton)

Interesting article about IBMs step back to "in order architectures":

What do you get out of it performance wise? If you look at the specfp2006, Power5+ at 2.2GHz reached 14.9 specfp2006, while Power6 reaches 22.3 specfp2006 at 4.7GHz - but of course, in an adapted Power5 machine. In summary, just under half additional speed at well over twice the clock.

The Power6 was something like the bogey man in the RISC world, but after all it´s a good evolution of their Power architecture. But´s by far not the "kill-all-other-proc" IBM and some analysts wanted to make us believe.

Tom Yager about Sun, analyst and the real objectives of analysts in The two technology markets:

Sun Microsystems isn't folding up its tent on SPARC because it doesn't stand a chance against POWER and x86, any more than it's planting and reading over Solaris because of the looming threat of Linux. Sun doesn't make strategic decisions based on analysts' manipulation of short-term stock market investors, and that's one of the reasons that I hold the company in such high regard.

I finally found the reason for the instabilities: The mysql database was corrupted out of unkown reasons. Since the correction the system seems to be stable.

Mich hat gerade eine SMS erreicht, in der berichtet wird, das der Karstadt in der Hamburger Innenstadt gerade geräumt wurde und weitere weiträumige Absperrungen errichtet worden sind. Wovor haben die Aussenminister bitte solche Angst, das sie es nicht wagen, in die Nähe der Leute zu kommen, die Basis Ihrer Macht sind?

Update: Ich nehme alles zurück ... es hat dort laut Hamburger Abendblatt gebrannt ...

Whenever you talk about technological advancements in operating systems in Solaris, you get the "But IBM has LPARS"-comment. Besides of having such a technology with LDOMS now and with XEN in the future, there is a major conundrum in this: How can a techology eating away up to 40% of your processor (IBM self-admitted in an withdrawn red book) have such a huge success as an emotional sales argument?

"Vista is compared to Mac OS X what AIX is compared to Solaris. Starts to be a cheap rip off"

Ben Rockwood wrote an excellent article about measuring I/O bandwidth: IO Benchmarking: How, Why and With What.

AIX has it´s own beta programm. It´s open. But no OpenAIX so far. But there is no real kicker in the new version so far: Workload Partitions ? Looks like Solaris Zones. RBAC is in Solaris since Solaris 8. RBAC in LDAP? For years now. Caching of name server requests. This is pretty much state of the art in all operating systems since .... since the last century. Probevue ... there is not much information about it. So i can´t really say anything about it. Looks like idea similar to dtrace.

The more interesting point is: I strongly believe, that IBM is in fear of Solaris. For a long time AIX was something like an unwanted child. Linux was the way to go. Commercial Unix systems lost their appeal in comparision to Linux. But then Sun revived Solaris with Version 10. And now there is a technological advanced enterprise class Unix. It left IBM without a competitive operating system for their high-end-server franchise. AIX 6 looks like a reaction to this. But in most fields Sun has years of advantages. When AIX6 comes to market, even the newest anticipated features in Solaris are in their third and fourth iteration.

Okay, it was too obvious to be surprised: IBM starts it´s benchmarketing run for Power6. And they start with the most useless benchmark: TPC-C. As some wise people said: TPC-C is a function over the amount of harddisks, not a benchmark about processor speed. And this baby had many disks in the benchmark configuration. 3312 36 GB harddisks to be exact. This configuration is worth for 1,616,162 transactions.

And now the kicker: Look into the benchmark about the old P5 1.9 Ghz p570. 809.144,09 transactions. But with only 1600 harddisk of the same size and the same speed.

With an twoandahalf-fold clock frequency increasement and two times the amount of harddisks i would expect more than twice the performance. Interestingly the amount of transactions per second is proportional to the amount of harddisks.

So IBM have only the choise to admit two things: Ether the TPC-C is not a benchmak with a significant message of system performance or their new Power6 baby doesn´t scale. At least not with AIX 5.3

So: This benchmark is not an archivement. It´s an embarrasment.

Joyent published their integration of Dtrace into Ruby and Rails. It´s a handy tool when you optimize your Rails application.