Matt’s Blog > Performance

A really random thought just popped into my head…
UNIX systems have their “swap” partition, a disk partition where unused stuff in RAM is “swapped out” to disk to make room for newer stuff in RAM. Of course, no hard drive is as fast as RAM, so you obviously want lots of RAM so you never [...]

I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…)
Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, it [...]

I think I’ve alluded earlier to the fact that I’ve been trying to speed up some systems at home, and how some of them are really slow. (I’m starting to suspect Norton, actually, but more on that when I find out more.)
I just came across this spiffy application, which will write and then read a [...]

From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file…
The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate a [...]

It’s no secret that gzip is handy on UNIX systems for compressing files. But what I hadn’t really considered before is that you don’t have to create a huge file and then gzip it. You can simply pipe output through it and have it compressed on the fly.
For example:
[root@oxygen]# mysqldump –all-databases -p | gzip > [...]

I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.)
As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML and [...]

I have a homework assignment to interview three people (with jobs) and ask them the three skills necessary to succeed at their job.
If you have a job, and think you’re able to perform it, would you be so kind as to answer? (And mention your position?)
*efficient*

A few tips, in the hopes that it’ll help someone else. (Aside: don’t download illegal stuff with BitTorrent. Do download the many awesome, legal things on BitTorrent, such as Ubuntu torrents.)

You can encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, which is meant at circumventing ISPs that feel like being pains and blocking traffic. However, “Enabled” isn’t the value [...]

From an eBay auction I stumbled across for a desktop PC:
256 MB Ram - Makes ALL your Applications RUN FAST

For those of you who don’t monitor police scanners regularly, I’d like to introduce what can be considered a fairly scary fact: their computer systems go down all the time.
Where it usually comes up is when they try to run a license plate or a person, or to query NCIC or similar. The officer calls [...]