The e1000 Nic is very common and can be found in many servers.  During my last NBD cluster engagement, on a set of 5 Dell 1950 servers equipped with a quad e1000 Nic, we were trying to tune cluster performance and one of the thing that was disapointing was that the system time, to processed interrupts from the Nics, was always low.  Since neither the ndbd processes or the mysqld processes were using a significant amount of CPU, we were wondering where the bottleneck was.

Then, Michel Donais, from the client, read the Linux driver documentation and bingo!!! Those e1000 Nics throttle interrupts by default at 8000/s.  8000… it is a big limiting factor….   design to prevent DOS attacks.  We removed the throttling and… reach more than 30,000 interrupt/s and guess what, the number of transaction per second scaled with it along with the ndbd and mysqld cpu usage.  Interesting isn’t it? Then I remembered another …

Dear Lazyweb,

So, I’ve been in Chicago for a week teaching a beginner and an intermediate course on using and administering Linux machines. This week, I’ll teach an intermediate and an advanced course on Linux, and the advanced course will cover profiling and debugging. The main tools I’m covering will be valgrind and oprofile, though I’ll be going over lots of other stuff, like iostat, vmstat, strace, what’s under /proc, and some more basic stuff like sending signals and the like.

So what makes me a bit nervous is, being that the advanced students are mostly CS-degree-holding system developers, they’ll probably be expecting me to know very low-level details of how things are implemented at  the system/kernel level. I’d love to know more about that myself, and actively try to increase my knowledge in that area! Alas, most of my experience with low-level …

In MySQL 5.0, InnoDB gained the ability to use Linux Large Page support for allocating memory for the buffer pool and additional memory pool.

A few customers have asked about using it and there is virtually no documentation on what is required on Linux to enable it. I actually ended up having to read some of the Linux kernel source code to figure out some of this.

This uses the API as documented at:

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt

To set this up and use it, you first need a kernel that supports it. All of the recent RHEL kernels do by default from what I can tell. On my Ubuntu systems, I'm not seeing it enabled normally.

Then on the OS level you will need to do the following procedures:

 # Set the number of pages to be used …

Red Hat gets a new VP. rPath appoints former Red Hat COO as chairman. Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source. Open source Windows. SCO formally files for Chapter 11. And more.

Official announcements
Industry Veteran Greg Symon Joins Red Hat as Vice President and General Manager of North American Sales Red Hat

rPath Welcomes Ex-Red Hat COO Tim Buckley rPath

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition LifeRay

Adaptive Planning …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, itâ€s a new fad. Itâ€s like youâ€re not cool anymore if you donâ€t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldnâ€t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone elseâ€s ideas – it doesnâ€t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and theyâ€re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

…

EMC buys some, but not all, of SourceLabs. Cfengine launches data center automation software. Open source and TCO. Measuring corporate contributions to open source. And more.

Official announcements
Self-repairing Data Center Automation solution released Cfengine

Acquia Joins Red Hat Exchange Bringing Social Publishing Expertise to the Open Source Ecosystem Acquia

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex DotNetNuke

The BitRock Network Service Improves Product …