Comments for Mindless Techie

Comment on Quick and Dirty Linux Load Testing by John Alberts

John Alberts — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:54:06 +0000

Thanks. I didn’t see that one and it looks like it would have been even easier to use and more powerful.
To tell you the truth, I was on an old RHEL4 machine that no longer had a valid RH license, so the only software I could install was what I could easily google and find. I found cpuburn-in fairly quickly and it seemed well suited for what I needed.

Comment on Quick and Dirty Linux Load Testing by tulcod

tulcod — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:56:56 +0000

also a nice tool is stress; see app-benchmark/stress

Comment on Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes by John Alberts

John Alberts — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 01:27:43 +0000

I tried to find what you were referring to about it degrading performance, and the only thing I could find is this:

> > Just as a side note but do you really want to reserve 5%
> > of your 2TB partition for root?

The filesystem performance will degrade if you eat into the last 5%,
but as long as you’re willing to live with this tradeoff, and assuming
you don’t need to reserve space for things like log files, then sure,
you can always drop the percentage.

So, this seems to indicated that performance will only be degraded if you start using that final 5%. It’s good to know, but for me, in some situations, the performance trade off is worth it.

Comment on Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes by Carlos

Carlos — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:03:20 +0000

Unfortunately this is a not so great tip. It could degrade perfomarce of your hard disk a lot. I know it because I tried for a while and the hdd was very slow. Theodore Ts’o, the mantainer of ext{3,4} advices to let this percentage as it is. If you don’t believe me, you can google for it.

Comment on Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes by John Alberts

John Alberts — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:37:15 +0000

Actually, it does this for any ext3 file system, regardless of the mount point. So, if you create seperate ext3 partitions for /, /usr, /home, /var, /boot, you’ve lost 5% of the blocks for each of those partitions. I’m not sure if it’s possible to disable this completely or not, but I see no reason not to reduce it to 1% instead of 5%. I haven’t had a chance to try something like ‘tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1′ on an unimportant partition.
Let me know if completely disabling it works for you.

Comment on Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes by Aniruddha

Aniruddha — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:09:34 +0000

Great tip! What about non root (/) partitions? Is it possible and desirable to disable the reserved-blocks-percentage on non root partitions?

Comment on New Job! by Corey Thurman

Corey Thurman — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:16:49 +0000

Hi John,
How do I contact you? I am looking for a couple senior Linux engineers.

Comment on Upgrading to 2008 profile wierdness by John Alberts

John Alberts — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:06:12 +0000

I did try eselect at first, but the problem seems to be with some servers not having the new releases directory, or at least the releases directory not being sync’d properly.
There’s quite a few threads on it in the forums, but for some reason, it took me quite a while to find it. The search function on the forum really sucks.

Comment on Upgrading to 2008 profile wierdness by gregf

gregf — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:29:46 +0000

I have my profile set to the following.

/usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/amd64/2008.0

Also I would recommend using eselect rather than just doing the link by hand.

eselect profile list

Comment on Turbotail and multitail by Matija "hook" Šuklje

Matija "hook" Šuklje — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:21:50 +0000

Well, if you find any notable difference between ‘turbotail’ and ‘inotail’, please let me know.

Cheers,
Matija