Benchmarking Cold Start on SLES 10
Posted on May 7, 2007
Filed Under Linux, Programming | Leave a Comment
Yesterday I began benchmarking an application’s cold start (after reboot) performance on SLES 10, and ran into an interesting problem. The results of my tests were varying wildly from between 2 to 3 seconds start-up time and 10-14MB of memory usage. After doing some investigating I found that the “zmd” process (zmd /usr/lib/zmd/zmd.exe) was getting kicked off at init time and eating a bunch of my CPU (10-50%) during my tests. I subsequently disabled zmd via “chkconfig –level 345 novell-zmd off”, rebooted and life was good. The memory used on the box post start-up went from 107MB to 98MB and the machine was quiet after the init sequence finished . Most importantly; however, I am now able to get repeatable results.
As an aside, I realize that disabling the Zen Network Manager impairs my ability to update and add software to my system but that begs the question, do I really need to be automatically notified of updates on my server machine? For me, the answer is no. Also, one wonders why Novell chose to write zmd in C#, an “exe” process running on my Linux box??
The Evolution of Ruby on Rails
Posted on March 25, 2007
Filed Under Programming | Leave a Comment
For all the Ruby on Rails fans, here is the natural evolution of the framework: SQL on Rails. Look for conferences at your local convention center.
Unhappy Credit Card Customer
Posted on January 13, 2007
Filed Under Linux | 2 Comments
Yesterday I received my monthly email notifying me that my credit card statement was available on-line; however, upon attempting to log-in I was greeted with an unpleasant surprise. It appears that my credit card company has made some upgrades; upgrades which appear to be incompatible with Linux.
My primary browser is Opera, so I wasn’t all that shocked to see that the site wasn’t tested with a browser that has only 0.87% market share. To be honest, my bank’s site doesn’t work properly with Opera either, but I was truly dismayed to witness firefox experiencing the same difficulty with the site. I played with my browsers a bit more and discovered that removing the flash plug-in allowed me to log-in. Very disappointing.