On Friday in the evening the router which has been the reason
for the bandwidth shaping on our mirror server has been replaced. The bandwidth usage immediately jumped
to over 160 MBit/s. I monitored the server yesterday and saw that we use
about 200 MBit/s (nothing unusual) but the load was most of the time
higher than 80.0. I disabled some services and tried to improve the situation but the load
nearly never went below 50.0. I finally changed the I/O scheduler to anticipatory
(echo anticipatory > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler) and now we have a load
of about 1.0 and a throughput of around 200 MBit/s. Much better.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Yesterday we saw The Brothers Grimm and we
both thought that it was a strange movie, but that was exactly what I expected from Terry Gilliam.
The beginning of the movie was a bit slow and it did not feel as it was supposed to have
a story. It felt like a mixture of many fairy tales without any purpose. Toward the end of the movie
the story was getting more clear and more like a conventional movie. Some good guys, some bad guys
with the inevitable happy end. I think that
Twelve Monkeys is much better.
Last week I started to port some of my Assembler (PPC) code to C, because the
Assembler code became pretty much unmaintainable and I forgot most of my motives
behind that code. I thought that it will not require more than 2 or 3 days to do this
but when I finally finished it yesterday it took me more than one week. That was really
frustrating to work so long on that code. Of course it is now much better and it is really
nice to read but I completely underestimated the time required to do this.
Another problem was that this was the code to flash the firmware and in the first few
iterations I destroyed the content of the flash and had to manually program the flash
in another machine to continue.
We just came back from seeing
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
in the cinema. It is pretty funny and we had a good laugh.
Today I was invited to an assessment center for my current job at IBM.
Currently I am working as a contractor for IBM. I am part of the team
writing the firmware for the Cell Blade and they have now a job opening
for my current position. I think I would prefer being a regular employee
because as as contractor I always get only a contract for 6 months and then
a new contract has be arranged and really like my current job.
The only problem now is that I know how to code in Assembler, Forth and C
but I think that the skills required in the assessment center are not the
ones I am really good at. My plan is to be just as normal as every day and
I hope if I do not get too nervous I will manage it next Wednesday.
I have just finished uploading and building a new version (2.2-1) of
source-highlight
for all Fedora Extras branches.
Yesterday we were informed that due to errors on the uplink between us (Esslingen) and our provider (Stuttgart) the bandwidth of our mirror server will be shaped to 80 Mbit/s to do some investigations what causes these errors.
As the usual bandwidth needs of our mirror server are between 120 and 160 Mbit/s this has of course a big impact on our performance. I hope that the errors are quickly fixed and that any limitations are removed as soon as possible.