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My last day at Sun - 9/18/2009 (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed September 16 2009) This Friday (Sept 18th 2009) will be my last day at Sun. I found an opportunity that I could not refuse. It been great working at Sun for the past 10 years. I have nothing but great things to say abou...

nicstat - the Solaris and Linux Network Monitoring Tool You Did Not Know You Needed (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog)

(Fri September 4 2009) Update - February 2010 Nicstat now can produce parseable output if you add a "-p" flag. This is compatible with System Data Recorder (SDR). Links below are for the new version - 1.22. Update - ...

nicstat - Update for Solaris only (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog)

(Fri August 14 2009) Update - August 2009 That's more like it - we should get plenty of coverage now :) A colleague pointed out to me that nicstat's method of calculating utilization for a full-duplex interface is n...

cmdtruss -- truss -c MySQL (COM_*) Commands (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed June 10 2009) MySQL clients uses COM_* commands to communicate with the MySQL server. MySQL show status breaks these commands into many categories and displays how many times each of these commands were executed...

Inniostat - InnoDB IO Statistics (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Thu May 28 2009) I wrote a small DTrace script to understand InnoDB IO statistics. This script shows statistics about different kinds of Innodb IO requests and how many of them result in actual IO. Sample output is sh...

InfoWorld weighs in on Energy Star for Servers (BM Seer)

(Wed May 27 2009) New article on Energy Star for Servers http://www.infoworld.com/print/76258 Idle servers are the devil's tools So what's wrong with the new Energy Star criteria? Perhaps the most significant drawback...

MySQL Innodb ZFS Best Practices (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue May 26 2009) One of the cool things about talking about MySQL performance with ZFS is that there is not much tuning to be done Tuning with ZFS is considered evil, but a necessity at times. In this blog I will ...

Miles per gallon or GPM, same as perf/watt or watt/perf (BM Seer)

(Tue May 19 2009) As a reminder: "Miles per gallon is misleading and can play tricks on our intuitions," Jack Soll said. Take this little test, if you think he is wrong: http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/news/mpg/mpg.html I...

Power-performance benchmarks show Linear estimates very accurate at different utilisation levels (BM Seer)

(Fri May 15 2009) Servers have near-linear power response between Idle and 100% utilisation, that is just knowing idle and 100% utilisation you can come up with very good estimates of watts used at any utilisation lev...

SPECpower_ssj2008 Sun Netra X4250 - SPECpower issues highlighted (BM Seer)

(Thu May 14 2009) Sun has finally published some results that show the configuration issues with SPECpower_ssj2008, these three results substantiate a just a few of the issues that I've been talking about with SPECpowe...

pstime - a mash-up of ps(1) and ptime(1) (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog)

(Mon April 27 2009) I have done some testing in the past where I needed to know the amount of CPU consumed by a process more accurately than I can get from the standard set of operating system utilities. Recently I hi...

Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS - Slides available (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed April 22 2009) Today Allan and I presented "Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS" talk at MySQL Conference 2009. You can get the slides here (I have uploaded it to the conference website also) Like I said during ...

MySQL 5.4 on 2 Socket Nehalem system (Sun Fire X4270) (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue April 21 2009) Now that MySQL 5.4 (internally code named performance version or summit) is officially released, I can tell you that I used MySQL 5.4 alpha for my Nehalem scaling studies in my earlier blog - MySQL ...

Reducing Innodb mutex contention (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue April 21 2009) Today Sun announces MySQL 5.4. This is a great day for customers as they can use systems with many cores much more efficiently. Its a great day for the MySQL community and the MySQL performance team ...

Sun Fire X4270 Server Two-tier SAP-SD ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Standard (BM Seer)

(Wed April 15 2009) World Record 2-processor performance result on Two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark World Record 2-processor performance result on the two-...

Sun's New World Record on SPECcpu (BM Seer)

(Tue April 14 2009) Today Sun announced world records for SPECfp2006: 50.4 on a 2-chip Nehalem (Intel Xeon X5570) Sun Blade X6270 as well as SPECint2006: 36.9 on a 2-chip Nehalem (Intel Xeon X5570) Sun Blade X6270. Rea...

MySQL Scalability on Nehalem systems (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Tue April 14 2009) MySQL Scalability on Nehalem systems (Sun Fire X4270) Today Sun announced multiple servers based on Intel's Nehalem Processor. I had early access to a Sun Fire X4270 server (2 socket) for a couple of...

Sun Fire X4275 Sybase IQ TPC-H 1000GB World Record Price Performance, Non-Clustered (BM Seer)

(Tue April 14 2009) This TPC-H result demonstrates that the Sun Fire X4275 server, powered by 2 Quad-core 2.93 GHz Intel Nehalem X5570 processors, using only 12 internal disks (SAS 300GB 15K RPM), achieved a QphH@1000GB ...

SPECjvm2008 on Sun Blade X6270 World record result (BM Seer)

(Tue April 14 2009) The Sun Blade X6270 server demonstrates Sun's position of leadership in Java based computing by publishing world record results for the SPECjvm2008 benchmark. The Sun Blade X6270 server delivered a re...

Green Grid tool assesses free cooling options (BM Seer)

(Fri April 10 2009) effective ones is to simply run servers at high-utilization which can save energy both to power the servers (2x to 5x more work done per unit of work watt!) and therefore you need less energy to cool ...

Sun's Try-and-Buy Program keeps running and making people happy (BM Seer)

(Wed April 8 2009) On this blog I spend my time talking about realistic comparisons. Sure I get digs by Sun's competitors who often try to change the subject and rarely answer my questions. Test our products yoursel...

New Feature for Sysbench - Generate Transactions at a Steady Rate (The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog)

(Mon April 6 2009) Perhaps I am becoming a regular patcher of sysbench... I have developed a new feature for sysbench - the ability to generate transactions at a steady rate determined by the user. This mode is enab...

SSDs for Performance Engineers (Neelakanth Nadgir's blog)

(Wed April 1 2009) Why should a performance engineer care about SSDs There has a been lot of buzz regarding SSDs lately. SSDs change the dynamics of the IO subsystem. You are no longer limited by rotational latency and...

Benchmark Dreaming or simply wishing too hard? (BM Seer)

(Tue March 31 2009) I had a dream two weeks ago... IBM, HP, Dell, etc. would publish measured watts on all current SPEC benchmarks. Oracle and IBM DB2 would publish results on TPC-E HP, IBM, Dell would publish SPECpowe...