Tuesday, September 11

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 September 2018

Tech News

  • Seagate's 14TB BarraCuda Pro disk drives are out.  (AnandTech)

    There's nothing particularly fancy about these, although they're filled with helium so they make amusing squeaky noises.  Oh, and peak transfer rate is over 260MB per second, which is pretty damn fast for a disk drive.

    I still have a couple of 14GB IBM disk drives in my Sun Ultra 5.  (The Ultra 5 only has one 3.5" bay, but it has an empty floppy bay, so...)

  • Nvidia's Jetson Xavier AI computer is available from Arrow Electronics.  (PCPer)

    Dev kit is $2500, so I think I'll stick with not buying Raspberry Pis instead.  (What is the plural of pi anyway?)

  • Intel issued a terse non-denial to rumours it is outsourcing some 14nm production to TSMC.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is a big deal.  TSMC is riding high on being the fab for Apple's iPhone chips, and has the funds to invest in new facilities.  Intel meanwhile is suffering through a four-year delay in getting their 10nm node into production.

  • AMD's Epyc 3000 is the Epyc 7000 series' unregarded little brother.  Serve the Home takes a look at the 8-core 3251.

    Fun fact: That Ryzen desktop chip you're using?  It contains four 10GbE network controllers.  Which you can't use because they're not wired up in Ryzen, but they are in Epyc.

  • Chrome is developed by idiots.  (Bleeping Computer)

    They decided to hide what they call "trivial subdomains" like www and m (for mobile).  But they fucked this up, so that if, for example, you owned www.com, google.www.com would show up as google.com, with the green padlock SSL security indicator and everything.

    Google fixed that one, but they are doubling down on stupid on the rest of it.

  • Digital Ocean Spaces are now available in San Francisco.

    Too late DO, just got a new hardware server.

  • Speaking of which, our new server naturally has the L1FT bug.  You'd either need a very old server, or an AMD Epyc system, to be free from that on X86.  It means if I want to play it safe I'll either need to disable hyperthreading (losing about 20% performance) or leave the remaining CPanel instances on their own server.  Though KVM might work too, I should check that.

    Also looking at going with native ZFS and RAIDZ rather than the RAID-5 / LVM lashup I have at the moment.

    Also, ZFS offers native comprssion (LZ4 by default) and optional deduplication, as well as the neat snapshots and filesystem replication and such.  InnoDB also supports compression, but last I checked it had a single compression thread making it a bottleneck on write-intensive workloads; on ZFS it's multi-threaded.

    This article examines some ZFS features, comparing performance of RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, and RAIDZ3 (equivalent to RAID-5, RAID-6, and RAID-7) with and without compression.  It's mostly concerned with disk drives but SSDs are also examined.

    I've picked up a couple of books on ZFS as bedtime reading.

    Also want to reinstall so I can do a clean install of LXD 3.4 in place of 3.0.  The ability to do local backups of containers (as opposed to snapshots or migrations) was introduced in 3.1 with the export command; Ubuntu 18.04 ships with 3.0.  I really want to be able to easily take local backups.  The export command is doubly nice because you can export a container complete with snapshots, so you can snapshot hourly and do an off-site backup daily, and if you have a disaster and need to pull the off-site backup and restore to an earlier point in time, you can.

    Update: Now getting 40K random write IOPS with queue depth 16.  I was getting around 18K on RAID-5, so this is a very clear win.  The secret is to tune the record size on each dataset - 4K or 16K for databases, 128K for file and application servers.  The default is 128K, which is fine for most workloads on spinning disks but is much too large for databases on SSDs.

Social Media News

Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/Madoka.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:58 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I think one of those cookies is a spoiler.

Posted by: mikeski at Wednesday, September 12 2018 10:39 AM (P1f+c)

2 Well, you shouldn't have accepted the GDPR cookie warning!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 12 2018 12:14 PM (PiXy!)

3 Looks like you're being spammed.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 13 2018 12:38 AM (Q/JG2)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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