Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:02:00 GMT
Compare the initial annoucnement
and the recently announced
rules just posted.
The Niagara team will make the decisions, and it’s in their sole discretion, but we’ve yet to place a limit on the number of systems we’ll give away
vs.
The judging panel will choose up to one (1) winner per Entry Period based on the highest scoring submission.
I guess they figured out what the limit will be. 1 per month.
so I’m waiting until next month now..
Colm’s benchmark is too good to bother even opening up the box for (and I think he deserves it as well)
Posted in Business Related | Tags niagra, sun, sunfire, t2000 | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:05:00 GMT
That is my sunfire. right now I am too busy to open it, and even if I did open it, it would be as useful as a door stop as I am missing a $15 cable (which I found out about thanks to this post on sunfire fanatics ).
I’m kinda pissed, as when I ordered the cable, the guy said it would take 3 days… when I called him again today it went up to ‘8’ (from today).
Of course the cisco cable was a custom job, and I don’t feel right cancelling on him and just ordering for someone else.
now the bigger problem.
where do I put this thing? :-)
and should I do it before my wife asks me how much this thing cost?
initial reaction: it’s light, and sun’s has a good supply chain.. when they make a promise (of delivering it) they keep it.
but this time isn’t wasted.. I’ve figured out what I am going to benchmark (my forum app) and I can do the x86-64 version now.
Posted in General | Tags niagra, sun, sunfire, t2000 | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:22:00 GMT
In anticipation of getting my sunfire , and doing some real benchamrks with it, I thought I’d do a quick, test to see if I can still do them..kind of like a warm up excerise before you do a 1500m swim.
So I grabbed 2 idle machines I have access too, and see how mysql 5.1 performed on both.
I took Brian’s mysqlslap tool and gave it a little whirl.
the 3 boxes I had in my aresenal are
- dual x86-64 @2.4G with 8G of ram
a
- 280R with 2 Ultrasparc III+ processors and 4G of ram.
and my new macbook
- a Intel Dual processor shiny thing
now in their time, both of these boxes were considered pretty sweet. (the 280R was purchased in 2002 I think, and for financial people just nearing the end of it’s lifecycle so you will still see these for a couple more years as dev boxes and file servers).
the test:
$ mysqlslap -a -c 20 -i 200
Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.003 seconds
vs
Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.621 seconds
and the laptop came in at about 0.012 seconds… not too bad
This is the main reason I got out of doing benchmark’s and performance tuning in my previous job.
In 4 years (2-3 lifetimes) the speed increase is about 500 times.
The answer for a lot of questions which used to be “design it better” is now “buy another box”...
I plan on running the same test on my sunfire when it arrives (bit with a lot more attention to detail).
If you are benchmarking a sunfire (in the hopes of getting it for free) feel free to stop by on sunfirefan.com and tell us about your experiences.
Posted in Development | Tags 280R, mysql, sun, sunfire | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:18:00 GMT
About 4 hours after I blogged about my frustration with apple, I got a knock on the door and a man with a MacBook in his hand was on the other side.
Sun also sent me a confirmation email saying my sunfire will be here on the 26th…
time to find a USB->serial converter, or better yet.. does anyone know of a cheap termserver? that would probably be a better option long-term.
one tip on ‘switchers’ to x86.. the activity monitor has a ‘Kind’ column.. so you can see what apps you need to rebuild/find.
Posted in General | Tags macbook, sun, sunfire, t2000 | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 04 Mar 2006 02:25:00 GMT
ok.. I bit the bullet and gave the sun people my credit card for security.
I get the box in 2-3 weeks..
I have also created a forum SunFire Fan so people who want to discuss how best to win their own sun fire can have a place to discuss what to do while they wait for their cool thread s box to arrive on their doorstop.
(It’s a pretty good deal $US 7k worth of machine for a blog post, and THEY drop it off and pick it up when your done if you don’t win) EASY.
I’d really like it if you mention SunFire Fan on your blogs.. The more people the better I say.
Posted in General | Tags sun, sunfire, t2000 | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 01 Mar 2006 20:28:00 GMT
So I got accepted to the trial & buy offer Sun I applied for recently.
All I need to is give them a credit card so they can pre-authorize the $AUD11,000 for the server, and noticed the small print saying I need to return the thing if I don’t like it.
I need to find out a little bit more about how one returns a $11k machine, and if that’s ok (and I can sneak the box past my wife) I think I will get it for 60 days and get it a good spin.
so far I have had Yusuf contact me about why niagra comes shipped with the prefork MPM model and not the faster (in my opinion) worker MPM one.
The answer to that one is for stability. some 3rd party applications (PHP) allow you to build them with non-thread safe extensions.
So if you are planning on benchmarking the sunfire, and stumble on this post.. make sure you spend some time configuring your applications on it so that they run properly. Don’t just run with the ‘default’ or you won’t all the performance you should.
Posted in General | Tags sun, sunfire, t2000 | no comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 25 Feb 2006 03:19:00 GMT
Jonathon Schwartz
has been offering eval Sun Fires to bloggers who give it cool reviews.
So .. I’ve signed up for one ;-)
hopefully I can impress them enough for them to let me keep it.
Posted in General | Tags sun, sunfire, t2000 | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:35:00 GMT
In what seems like another domino falling, Sun opensources it’s enterprise suite.
Reiterating that “open source is the future” of the software industry, and that “volume wins, every time,” Schwartz stressed that Sun is bent on becoming the preferred software platform to run the next-generation Internet.
I’m guessing Java will be OSS in 6-12 months time.
But I think the bigger question is when is the consolidation going to happen, and what will it look like?
It seems that every man and his dog is now opensourcing their product line in order to get the market share, and of course the consulting and support dollars that comes with it.
Schwartz believes that giving away its enterprise software, and embracing the open source philosophy will lure more developers and customers to its side. He hopes to do this at the expense of rival Microsoft.
I don’t think they will get >1< microsoft developer out of this. The Microsoft developer is comfortable with his VB.NET and windows, and having yet another open source implementation of a Java server is not going to sway him.
If they get additional developers using this, it will be at the expense of other java servers (commerical and OSS).
What is needed is not another Java Open Source product, but a merger of existing products.
In the commerical world, this was easy.. you offer them money..
But how do you do a M&A in the opensource space.
To quote Steve
..
I’m so excited I could lie down
Is it just me, or is all this java stuff slowly becoming irrelvent.
Don’t get me wrong people use it, you will always find a job coding it, it is reliable, enterprise ready, and “no one ever got sacked for using java”.
but the sexy things are happening elsewhere and the alpha-geeks are switching to rails & django, the masses will slowly follow…
I’m just waiting for the control-data ads of 20 years ago “learn cobol in 3 months.. with a guarnteed job at the end of it” being run on TV but with java instead of cobol. (or are those jobs in all in India now?)
Posted in Business Related | Tags java, opensource, sun | no comments | no trackbacks