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Making Servers go faster
Written by Fritz Husselmann   
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 15:07

hard-drive-data-recoveryYesterday we decided to rebuild a server named Maudslay, which is responsible for automatically building our products every night.  It had recently developed a somewhat pronounced limp, due to a couple of bad blocks. on the hard disks.   Fortunately, nothing was lost, though we started to notice some strange and scary behaviour.


It was the first time I actually opened it up, and I was surprised at the hard drive that had actually started to fail. It was an oldschool  Seagate 20GB drive (you know, like the one Noah kept his TurboCAD drawings of the Ark on). A quick check of the Seagate date code reveals it was manufactured on 25 July 1999 - how's that for durability?   The hard drives were even older than the server itself!

 

In any case, both of the drives have now been replaced with more modern units, configured in RAID for some extra safety. The system is also being migrated from Windows 2003 to Linux in the same go, which (together with the more modern hardware) has yielded some interesting results with regards to how fast the system builds Pick & Send - though I wondered if moving to/from Linux would make a big impact.

 

I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to my development machine (a pretty-speedy Core2 Duo with plenty of RAM and a pretty speedy HDD), it absolutely flies despite having less than half of the memory of my PC...

 

 

Performance: Before and After
My PC Old Maudslay New Maudslay
Performance Increase
System startup 2 minutes 3-4 minutes 10-20 seconds 1400%*
Building Pick & Send 2:30
5:30
40 seconds! 825%

* doesn't really count because it's been changed from Windows to Linux, but still!

 

... and we were speculating that we'd see an improvement of, oh, 30 seconds to a minute off the build times of the old Maudslay?!

 

So the moral of the story is upgrade your hard drives and run Linux!

 

 
Engineers with Cool Projects
Written by Paul Norrie   
Monday, 21 September 2009 17:47

Last Friday, I went to the Auckland Uni and passed judgement on 10 soon-to-be-graduate engineers and their research projects.   After four years of studying engineering, these guys had come up with very cool projects for their research.   Since Ablaze was a sponsor for the research projects, I got to choose one team to rule them all.  Well - at least to win thier category.

This year, I was judging the Software Apps category.   Software Apps is a difficult category to be in because it's a little difficult to wow your audience when beside you is a swimming robotic fish that swims around without bumping things until you draw on the screen - and then it swims around in the route you drew.   However, I wasn't juding that one - just the Software Apps.

 

Thus, I awarded Raymond Yeung and Han Narapanich the Ablaze Software Winner of the 'Software Apps' Category for their research on studying in Second Life where I had to perform a titration using Second Life.   I hadn't done a titration since Stage I Chemistry at Uni and I had never used Second Life.  Auckland Uni have their own island called Long White Cloud, which has a virtual medicine center for training nurses by simulation.   Naturally I started thinking about training Pick & Send users using simulation in Second Life...

 

 


 

 


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