Monday, May 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 May 2020

No Infinitive Split Before Its Time Edition

Tech News

  • I got one of those SSDNodes, um, nodes.  6 cores on a dual E5-2690 v3 host, 24GB RAM, 240GB SSD, for what works out, with a combination of three different deals, to $10.33 per month.  That would get you one core, 2GB RAM, and 50GB of SSD at Digital Ocean.

    On the one hand, Digital Ocean has a ton of features SSDNodes doesn't - the ability to resize your VPS on demand, private networking, block storage, firewalls, floating IPs, load balancers - and hourly billing.  You only need to pay for what you need to pay for, from one hour to the next.

    On the other hand, if you are prepared to commit a year in advance SSDNodes can be one-tenth the price for equivalent capacity.

    Couple of limitations: There's no easy way to configure your VPS with native ZFS - though it is possible to create a ZFS pool on top of EXT4, which gives you all the ZFS filesystem features at the cost of CPU overhead.  That's what you get if you follow their helpful LXD configuration guide.

    And they require you to run one of their prebuilt Linux installs - no custom images or interactive installs.  But as noted you can run LXD and configure your containers any way you want.

    I/O performance isn't bad.  I created a 12GB swap file and watched while it was written.  Average throughput was 236GB/s; peak was 580MB/s.  Reads measured by hdparm run at around 100MB/s plus or minus 15%. 

    That's not amazing, but having 24GB of RAM available will go a long way to ameliorate that. And if you need disk performance they have NVMe nodes available.  I didn't bother since I already have a dedicated server for that.

    Unless I run into something unexpected - something far beyond just the CPU being shared with other users - it's a bargain.


  • I've started working on retiring our backup server, which costs nearly as much per month as Midori - the SSDNodes VPS - does per year.

    It contains 90 million files, dating back to 1994.  No, I don't know how it has files dating back to 1994, but it does.

    I remember now that when I got this huge 48TB ZFS server I copied all the old backups onto it and then uncompressed them.  The idea was that I could create a global directory and remove all the duplicates; there's at least a dozen copies of everything in there.

    I never actually got around to any of that, so now I need to recompress about 15TB of massively duplicated data.

    This might take a while.  But at least I can mostly just fire it off and leave it to run.

    I've started with a relatively modest directory - just 125GB and 920,000 files.  About 1% of the total.  We'll see how that goes.  

    And while it runs I'm downloading all my GOG goodies.


  • Intel has joined TSMC in plans to build a fab in the US unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)

    It seems that Intel is in talks to offer a dedicated foundry facility.  They do offer foundry services, but almost all of their capacity is used for their own chips. Their one major customer was Altera, but then they bought them.


  • GIFs considered harmful.  (Danny Guo)

    MJPEG is a thing, you know.


  • Comparing Renoir to Ice Lake.  (Phoronix)

    How does the Ryzen 4700U compare with the i7-1065G7?

    Considering that the Ryzen has eight cores and the i7 only four, you'd expect it to be a benchmark massacre.  And so it is.  Intel ekes out a few wins on benchmarks that don't multi-thread well, but AMD wins 88% of the comparisons by an average of 72%.


  • What's new in WSL2?  (Bleeping Computer)

    If SQL is pronounced Sequel, isn't WSL pronounced Weasel?

    Anyway: Real Linux kernel (which will fix some bugs I've noted when trying to use LMDB and compressed executables), much much faster I/O, and a long list of bug fixes.


  • Someone is hacking supercomputers...  To mine cryptocurrency.  (ZDNet)

    If this were the 80s, we'd be up to WWXVII by now.


  • The latest version of Doom comes pre-doomed.  (Ars Technica)

    It includes the Denuvo kernel-level malware.


Disclaimer: Woof woof woof.  Grrr woof woof bark growl.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:29 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 719 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Does Me'n you have .webm or mp4 embed support?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, May 18 2020 03:29 AM (5iiQK)

2 Not specifically.  I will add it though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 18 2020 03:40 AM (PiXy!)

3 I thought SQL was pronounced Squeal.  WSL is clearly pronounced Whistle, as an homage to Windows Codename Whistler.

Apparently Denuvo was added to Doom after the game was released.  I guess the trick will be to wait until it's cracked and they release a patch that removes it.  I wasn't planning on getting it any time soon anyway, just too many other games.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 18 2020 08:03 AM (Iwkd4)

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




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