Xaprb

I’ll be presenting at the Southern Computer Measurement Group’s meeting on Thursday. I’ll discuss how to extract scalability and performance metrics from TCP/IP packet headers. Registration is inexpensive, but it’s even less if you register by Monday. There is a full schedule of other good talks — it is an all-day meeting.

I recently set up the solarized color theme for my terminal emulator. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but procrastinated. However, I finally got really frustrated with the colors I get from “ls” sometimes — I use a dark terminal with light fonts, and the directory listings in particular can become invisible, with dark blue on black.

Solarized is much improved. All of the colors work well together and are easy on the eyes. What a relief! Recommended for programmers and system administrators. There are plugins or configuration files for a huge variety of programming environments and programs, including Vim of course.

I use XFCE’s terminal, and I found that there was no terminal configuration file for it in the download. But I found a workaround: just append the colors listed in this file to the end of $HOME/.config/Terminal/terminalrc.

Brendan Gregg has a very good ongoing series of blog posts about the importance of measuring latency at the layer that’s appropriate for the question you are trying to answer. If you’re wondering whether I/O latency is a problem for MySQL, you need to measure I/O latency at the filesystem layer, not the disk layer. There are a lot of factors to consider. To quote from his latest post:

This isn’t really a problem with iostat(1M) – it’s a great tool for system administrators to understand the usage of their resources. But the applications are far, far away from the disks – and have a complex file system in-between. For application analysis, iostat(1M) may provide clues that disks could be causing issues, but you really want to measure at the file system level to directly associate latency with the application, and to be inclusive of other file system latency issues.

Someone should add Brendan’s feed to Planet MySQL. Here are the articles: part 1, part 2. Brendan will be talking about this topic at Percona Live on the 26th.