It's a good blend of both reads and writes.

We have tables that have as many as 100m records, where Solaris/ZFS seemed to help massively was the big reads for reporting. We have indexed it pretty aggressively, even going so far as to index statements and managed to pull amazing performance, considering the concurrency we see from a free database. (Which for the record, has never given us any problems... postgres has been rock-solid)

for the most part it was running "ok" on linux, but the bump we got from the testing on Solaris with ZFS with identical hardware and similar configs was nothing short of amazing.

One of the big differences between the 2 configs, we disabled the raid controler (A dell perc 6/i) to run jbod instead of Raid 1+0. I've not tried to do a stripe configuration on Linux with a similar configuration , even without compression. To be fair to the linux performance, i really need to setup and test with a similar config to make sure my results were not hardware related.

A friend had told me where solaris and ZFS really gives the big bump on the performance is how it's not having to read each byte from the disk, it's reading a compressed block and decompressing it on the fly, which if you have the CPU cycles to spare causes the io transfers to be a lot quicker. (at times 2-3x faster than a raw read with uncompressed data)

I'm guessing that we could probably get similar results with Linux on XFS or ext4 using solid state drives, which are now a little more affordable than they were years ago.

Again, we're not a large shop with lots of money to throw around at the project, we're a startup just trying to get by in a brutal economy. :)

You're right though about the default configuration. I've gone through and tuned the work memory, index cache, tuned the memory to match my hardware. (Currently 32 gigs on an array of 8 disks on a 8 core Xeon server)...

The throughput for large data sorts are just faster, period.

A lot of it has to do with the reading of compressed data, and the huge ram-buffer that ZFS uses on the OS, optional commit on writes, block sizes that match the database pages.

The system scans 3 megs of index data, what it's actually reading to get that off is say 1 meg, which it decompresses on the fly on one of the many cores the database server has. In the end throughput destroys what i get running non-compressed volumes on EXT4 or XFS on Linux. For "MY" database, it runs nearly 2-3x faster than the same hardware running on Linux. (RHEL5 is what I ran the db on for a long time).

I have not been able to get Linux/Postgres to run even partially as fast as I have been able to get Solaris/ZFS running Postgres 8.3.

Btrfs isn't even near production states yet, but i am really hoping that it will give me an option to get off of Solaris.

On that note, one thing i haven't tried yet with our DB is Solid State Drives. The sheer throughput might more than make up for the benefits i get on compressed ZFS volumes.

I for one am VERY VERY hopeful that BTRFS can get stable, and fast. Oracle's fiasco has me and a few other people at our small business very nervous. I'm not planning on replacing our Sol10 (free) distribution , and could care less about the support Oracle offers. I'm playing with Solaris Express 11 now, but not sure I want to pay the $1k a year for production use, though if it offers me the performance gains over linux that I'm currently seeing, it will probably be worth it for our Database system alone.

Has anyone here had experience tuning Postgres on Linux versus Solaris/ZFS ? We're not a huge shop, 8 people running large data-warehouse type applications. We run on a shoestring and don't have a bunch of money to throw at the problem and would be very grateful for any ideas on how to make our database run with comparable performance on Linux. I'm hoping that I'm missing something obvious.

They ARE doing what nobody else is, they have Bing'd their phone through and through.

No more pesky google services, at least without a lot of effort.

I get first-class access to Hotmail and Exchange, why would i bother with wanting a native GMail client.

Google Voice integration? Glad they keep that shit off my phone.

Google Navigate? I'll happily pay for my Garmin numi thank you.

Google Voice Search? I'm a little irritated that they tricked me into the 411 services to help them train that. I'm boycotting that little app.

Maybe when you leave your mothers basement.

From what I'm reading, it could be python Syntax and it just wouldn't matter. It's the running of code in a bytecode virtual-machine where the patents seem to have bite.

Interpreted scripts are going to be a hard sell to developers, it either needs to natively compile or at least compile into a bytecode blob.

I personally would be resistant in investing hundreds of hours, or millions of dollars in marketing and development for a big title to only have Python scripts being passed around for the world to take and use.

I have 2-3 routers like this at my house.

I found that when i'm at my moms place, she has a lot of dead spots in her home. I've tried to catch reception from the back-yard patio for example. Their house was wired for ethernet, to at least 3 major points in the home which are all tied to the router. I created 2 access points on the 2 oposite sides of the house.

Sure it's 802.11b , but that's enough for my iphone to connect to or one of my sisters to attach a laptop to , to simply check her Facebook or email.

802.11b is slow, but really it's faster than the 3G cell networks still, and is fast enough to do most tasks that any typical laptop user might need.

I unloaded some old junk, and scored points on the parent-meter = ) It's a great way to pass on the love, and improve those long sunday visits when you can't get good signal to their main router. =)

I find it amusing when research groups drone on about this or that, in the end the Marketing groups that are pushing millions of dollars in advertising a month know when so much as a fraction of a point changes in conversion rates, either direction.

Online marketing seems to be very reactionary and any group I've worked with that have managed to stay successful know their numbers VERY well. The only way that too-targeted of ads won't work is if people don't click on it.

The marketing-departments don't give a flying rats ass about privacy, morality or ethics. They ONLY care about what will convert your click to a conversion, and nothing more.

Paying more or less for that marketing data is only useful or valuable to them if you give them your eyes, or money.

For them to coach where a marketing department should put their budget is laughable, and if a marketing group is having to even ask that question, they aren't making their decisions based on performance, they are making it based on assumptions and feelings which will be nothing more than a Fail-Boat marketing campaign, and likely has no clue what they are doing and won't stay/survive in that market long.

Haha :) +1

I've been using Linux since the early days, and was on the linux desktop back when KDE was 1.x , I've long since abandoned Linux on the desktop since OS X has come out and been strong. (I'm a linux-server junkie, but no chance for using it with my desktop) I just don't have time to deal with all the crap-software and second rate desktop environment. Shitty hardware support, terrible video drivers. (I use dual 30inch monitors on a modern NVidia gfx card). The drama list goes on and on.

I was playing with this release of Ubuntu this weekend on a testing workstation i have at home, and I was thinking for myself for the first time in years. Maybe I'll give Linux a shot again as a workstation replacement at work vs. OSX on my Mac Pro. I love to try new things, but previous linux desktops have just been a steaming pile of shit compared to the fit and finish of OSX.

I write Java software for deployment on Linux servers, I'm hardly a "retard", but from reading Slashdot today you'd think it's the end of the fucking world with this release of Ubuntu. I just found it ironic that it's the first version of linux in 5 years i've considered to let back on my desktop.

Maybe it is the year of the Linux Desktop. :) Great post!

Maybe you missed the memo, but Palm is now on Verizon and soon to be on AT&T.
They haven't been exclusive to Sprint for some time now.

But yes, I agree with your points. Given the money and more important, marketing channels that HP already has in the retail sector for their computers, they could rock out with a solid tablet offering.

There isn't many technical shops or mass-chains (Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, etc. that do not already have HP shit on their shelves..)

If HP puts some quality products out the door at a good price, they could knock this out of the park. WebOS is an amazing platform, and is in my opinion much more refined than android. (I own an Android phone, and used an iphone for years, have never owned a palm phone myself .. only played with them..) From my experience thus far on a Nexus One, Android is a steaming pile of shit and i wish i never bought into the hype of it.

Are you kidding? Do you really have a nexus one?

Try googling Nexus One Touchscreen Issues.
Or nexus one Bluetooth.

Sounds like the Desire is a HUGE upgrade over the nexus one. I'm going to be putting my N1 on ebay shortly, and try to unload it while there are enough suckers out there that would be willing to try it.

I've been using my N1 on ATT for nearly a month, and despite my love for google services, which i use daily, the phone is a complete Fail compared to the iPhone and it's the last time i'll buy a google or HTC phone.

As a few others have stated, Eve is just like this.

I've been playing online games, off and on, in various forms since the early 90's on Muds. I'm the classic person who should NOT be playing games like World of Warcraft.

I've got an addictive personality and i waste vast amounts of time playing them, often at the neglect of things that should take priority.

I started playing eve, and it seems to have cured my desire to spend time on the game daily. I might login once in a while to change the queuing for my skills, etc, but overall i don't feel compelled to 'grind out' anything..

the ships i can fly or the skills i can do are held out by simply just waiting. It's a game that encourages you to leave and wait. :) for my personality it seems to fit well.

What our corp does, is about once a week, we'll run 'stuff', ie. clear out new spawned encounters in our wormhole, etc. but it's a 1x a week maybe 1x every 2 week sorta thing. I get my online 'fix' , without having to meet aggressive raid schedules or plan my life around the game.

But, this isn't a problem with WoW , it's a problem with me. I'm the one that has an obsessive personality and frankly i'm probably better just not touching an online game at all.

But, on that note, my online gaming is more what i would consider 'normal' than before, which was unhealthy and obsessive.

Real-time based progress has helped me cure myself of that tendency to want to be online at any capable time because my friends are progressing without me.

My hat goes off to people that can play WoW in a way that doesn't wreck their lives. I am not one of those people.

Yup. :) I have done a bunch of small pet projects w/my work using sqlite and it's been awesome.

For quick and dirty data-processing tasks, it's a god-send.

We tried JRuby.

We had various deployment problems, i'm sure that many people have managed to make it work, but we got about 2 days of trying to port in a medium-sized, high concurrent project, and we finally came to the conclusion that it's better to stay closer to the mainline c-based Ruby than diverge our project to JRuby and deal with the dangers of working on the bastard-project (when we talked to some of the guys at sun, back when we made the choice to give JRuby a try, there was only 3-4 paid employees working on it... it just felt too edgy for us, and we were looking to stabalize our project, not go down a lonely road of untested/unknown.... )

As they say, sometimes it's better the demon you know , than the ones you don't.

Disclaimer:

1. We have had a LOT more success with rails, than failure. And we're getting a LOT more done now than before when doing struts/JSP/JDBC style dev.

2. My lead developer wrote a book on Rails development for Oreilly, (rails handbook), he is leading our charge into Grails even having a substantial background in Ruby/Rails.

I'd never say I regret doing our projects in Ruby, nor do I feel like JRuby would of solved my problems. I'm happy with Grails, and it has well complimented our teams capabilities and experience. We write code to solve problems and generate revenue, we don't have the luxory of coding at a well funded public company, we pay our mortgages and car payments from code we write every week. Ruby has met the challenge for us, but it's silly not to explore our options to try and make our new projects even more robust and improve our development, and our current dilemma of ongoing maintenance.

It's a double-edged sword.

I've been involved with rails pretty extensively now for a few years, and i've enjoyed the platform for the most part. A few projects we've launched have grown pretty complex, and we too have had some problems with the code management, but discipline seems to help and a steady peer review.

Ive been working with Java pretty much exclusively since the late 90's, with exception of the last few years which have been focused on Rails projects. I've recently been working with Grails (Grails.org) which is a Java based stack taking the great concepts from RoR platform.

As someone who has never worked with Java, I believe that Grails might not be as easy to pickup and learn, but as someone who has an extensive Java background, it's a serious breath of fresh air. For a large scale project, I MUCH prefer grails code management to rails approach. Obviously with my Java background, i'm partial to Grails.

On the note of deployed code, a few of our rails projects have grown to be pretty large. I've had to implement a LOT of hardware to handle the scaling of usage. We've been able to do a lot of improvements to the code, but compared to the speed and efficiency of Java (Yeah, I never thought i'd say that) I'm a little bit 'burnt' on rails.

Comparing something like Passenger on Apache to Glassfish or Tomcat is like getting out of a 2009 BMW 5 series and jumping into a 1991 Kia.

The first time in YEARS i have had run-away processes take down an entire server, I've migrated all of our servers to Xen servers because i got tired of driving to the datacenter 1-2x a week or making a remote hands call to reboot a server because a zealous process took things down. (Did I mention i bought a load balancer to manage the traffic, i'm doing on 10 machines what i used to do on 3 machines w/my java apps)..

I'm sure that there are folks that know Rails better than I do, we're a do-everything group (4 guys managing a LOT of code and servers), not a large IT shop by any stretch, but on one hand we've hit epic levels of productivity. We've gotten projects out fast, and some of them have done well. We've had other projects we assumed would do great, but ended up failing due to marketing miscalculations. The lesson I'd say i've learned with Rails, is it's better to get a 'good enough' product out the door and then figure out how to tighten it down later than not even make it to the race.

I'm hoping that i can bypass that compromise with Grails, but time will tell. :)

Either way , Rails absolutely has it's place in the Open Source server software stack world. In the end it's just a matter of remembering that if you are doing rails programming, you better be doing it with a Test-Driven development style, as large projects can get out of control.

I've not looked at RoR 3.0, but i'm hoping that they have implemented a Service-style implementation for business logic, rather than encouraging to have it thrown into the Models.

Yeah, but even Access has it's place.

I had a simple tool that needed writing a few years ago, a engine that generated checks from mail-in rebates. It was a simple import process from a CSV and a daily print-job from our logistics room. That project was thrown together on a weekend and is still in use today, no problem no drama.

I could of written something in Java and put it on the web, and done PDF outputs, etc etc. but why? Access was a nice little tool that did EXACTLY what the problem required. A VB front end would of taken an extra day or two of time to get working and tested when i could copy a Access file to any computer running access and had a printer plugged into it and they were good to go. :)