Probably

Intrigued by my recent benchmarking exercise I decided to take a look at the various operating systems’ performance on a common virtualisation platform. (continue reading…)

A short while ago I got the opportunity to compare the performance of a number of operating systems on the same piece of hardware.

The server in question was a HP DL580G5, but with four 6-core Intel Dunnington CPUs in, each running at 2.66ghz. (continue reading…)

When it comes to picking what Operating System to use for your project, how do you go about picking the ‘right’ one?

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Recently a friend and I were trying to get XenServer 5 to use our Solaris 10 server as it’s backing store. We specifically wanted to use an iSCSI volume exported to the Xen server, as the performance is promised to be considerably better than NFS.

However, try as we might, the XenServer wouldn’t make use of the iSCSI LUN as exported – it could see it, but wouldn’t make use of it. Then we discovered this bug… (continue reading…)

I’ve been testing some new kernel tunings for Oracle databases the last few days, and experienced the odd error “error: unknown error 22 setting key ‘kernel.shmall’” when trying to sort out shared memory. Even more bizarre was the fact the setting was actually being set just fine.

After Googling a bit I couldn’t fathom out what this error meant or what was really wrong. So I did a quick strace on a ’sysctl -p’. Bingo.

I had a comment at the end of the line in sysctl.conf! It was that simple. Move the comment to the line above, et voila, no whining!