Computing Performance Google Group

Guerrilla Capacity Planning

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:44:31 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
The rather amusing and always useful Guerrilla Capacity Planning
has a home on the web at

I noticed today the Universal Scalability Law references, pointing
to Gunther's upcoming book:

Troubleshoothing High Load

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 23:03:53 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
I just noticed an excellent tutorial by Kyle Rankin on
Troubleshooting High Load applicable to any *NIX system:

[link]

A great primer for new sys-admin recruits :)

Best -Federico

Nvidia Parallel Forall

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:01:04 UT

Hello Computing Performance,

NVidia has a new developer blog titled, aptly enough, "Parallel
Forall"

[link]

Some interesting tidbits on GPU performance in there.

Best -Federico

Fortran is faster than C

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:43:31 UT

Hello Computing Performance,

I have run into the issue of optimizing memory-copy operations in C
being interfered with by C's ability to have pointers to overlapping
memory areas at least twice in the past month, so I thought I'd point
to this essay I was reading yesterday in NYC:

[link]

64 bit benchmarks

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:17:35 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
Ran into this deck recently, and although it is a bit dated, it has
nice benchmarks and micro-benchmarks comparing 32bit and 64bit x86
architecture performance.

[link]

Slide 11 has a nice acknowledgement of SUSE's work on GCC enablement

Performance Tuning Dojo #1: vmtouch

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 05:36:03 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
I am happy to announce that I have joined Linux New Media as a
columnist for Admin Magazine in the Fall. "Performance Tuning Dojo"
will appear in the coming issue of the magazine (those of you in
Europe already have access to it), and covers page loading behavior
and forcing (or better yet making consistent) page loading behavior

Cloud I/O Benchmarks

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:09:25 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
Another very nice piece of work from CloudHarmony:

[link]

excellent data comparisons on the performance of EBS block storage.

Best -F

Re : TI Pandaboards improving at breakneck pace...

kkevi...@mit.edu (Kurt Keville) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:57:13 UT

We added our board to this test...
[link]. It was an
original Panda (EA3) with a similar hardfp build from the first week
of February. While some of the benchies are predictably 20% slower
than the ES, it is interesting to note that some actually performed

TI Pandaboards improving at breakneck pace...

kkevi...@mit.edu (Kurt Keville) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:29:33 UT

probably better than a Moore's Law rate... some benchmarks are twice
as good after you upgrade your OS... substantially facilitated by the
armhf kernel...
see [link]
we are going to try and recreate these benchmarks with attached power

Benchmark: Video Card Power Consumption

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:21:56 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
A group in France has done a hands-on measurement of the real power
consumption of 73 different video cards:

[link]

Best -Federico

Judge 0.1

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:41:56 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
At Ubuntu Developer Summit, I just learned of a new bit of shell
benching wizardry (or aspiring to be one):

[link]

Judge compares the run time for two programs and tells you if there’s
a statistically significant difference.

SSD Performance

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:51:32 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
Kyle Rankin has an interesting piece benchmarking current generation
SSDs in six different ways on Linux Journal of October (now only
online/paywalled, no more paper edition), "Return to Solid State".

Kyle compares login time, desktop startup, hdparam, bonnie++,

ZCAV on display

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:47:42 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
I pointed to an article on CPU last year discussing ZCAV on current
hard drives, and the difference was found to be fairly limited.

I was trying out the Ubuntu "Disk Utility" built-in benchmark a few
days back, and I was surprised by results showing that in a Lenovo

Performance Basics "always-on" awareness

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:57:26 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
I was playing with Byobu in Ubuntu 11.04 today,

[link]
[link]

and I was very pleased with the results. This is a screenshot of what
my quake-terminal looks like now:

[link]

Steve Best on Systemtap

flucifr...@acm.org (Federico Lucifredi) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 22:15:21 UT

Hello Computing Performance,
Nice piece by Steve Best (author of the memorable "Linux Debugging
and Performance Tuning") on Linux Pro Magazine #129 (August 2011):

"On Tap"

It is a nice introduction to SystemTap with basic examples of time
accounting, entry/exit counting, and more general instrumenting (which