Performance - Chronicles of Technology

Performance

A collection of 5 posts

The Sin of Generalization

The Sin of Generalization

Our ancestors gifted us with a great ability: visual pattern recognition. It helped them survive by distinguishing tree branches from pythons and good fruit from bad. We train neural networks to recognize patterns, generalize, and create variations, with one difference: we teach them when to stop.

Database: It's Hard to Explain

Database: It's Hard to Explain

When you are enough time in the business, you learn the universal rule of IT: "Computers don't make mistakes, people do." It is especially true for database performance tuning.

Creating a test file to test I/O performance

For the purpose of testing the performance of a cloud storage volume, I recently came across the xfs_mkfile command. This command creates a file called 30GigFile.out that is 30 GB in size: xfs_mkfile 30720m 30GigFile.out What I do is simply test the timing of how long

Flashback: The Lesson I Learned

Flashback: The Lesson I Learned

This piece is not about features or products. It's about lessons that we learn or not. The one I learned some twenty-three years ago was: "Don't ask for troubles and do one thing at a time."

Checking Linux host performance (for the newbie)

Checking Linux host performance (for the newbie)

Every time I interview someone (for a non-Unix admin position) and ask them how they would check for performance on Linux, I'd like to say that the only answer I always get is top. So this blog post is meant for everyone I've interviewed in my