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Good thing I wasn't drinking coffee at that time
Slashdot can be disastrous to your keyboard and monitor. Some comments definitely need some Surgeon General like warning 🙂
Good thing I wasn’t drinking coffee at that time
Slashdot can be disastrous to your keyboard and monitor. Some comments definitely need some Surgeon General like warning 🙂
Niagara does a Chuck Norris on Itanium/Xeon
Colm “Punish thy Server” MacCárthaigh has published his awesome benchmarks with the Sun T2000. Colm is also looking at ssl-offload benchmarks for the T2000. I hope my engine(3) patch for flood gets to see some action.
As Chuck Norris fans would say, the Niagara roundhouse kicked the Itanium and the Xeon.
For those of you not familiar with the Chuck Norris meme on the Internet, may I point you to this great video of the man himself reading some Chuck Norris facts
Updated to the latest NNW beta
Brent Simmons has posted beta builds of the latest NetNewsWire beta. I wasn’t one of the really early worms but I snagged myself 2.1b7. So far, it’s very spiffy and snappy.
Love the NewsGator syncing. I’m really looking forward to the 2-yr subscription of NewsGator online I get for being a NNW customer. Posting to blogs via MarsEdit rocks also.
engine(3) support for flood
hacked a patch up to provide engine(3) support for flood.
Patch compiles on my AMD64 box, now I just need to scrounge for a Niagara so I can see if it takes advantage of the insane RSA performance to be the “Speedy Gonzales” of https load testers
A shout-out to anyone in Sun. Help me make the Niagara look good 🙂
Just when you thought it was safe
Before IDF, CPU choices particularly if you were looking for performance and reasonably good thermal envelope was easy. The AMD64 in all its variant pretty much ruled the roost.
Now, 2006 is looking to be a very interesting year particularly if you are looking at a hardware refresh in the second or third quarter. As detailed in this RealWorldTech post by David Kanter, Intel’s new Core Architecture is shaping up to be a strong contender.
Combine this with Apple’s switch to Intel and the possibility of combining good hardware from Intel with the slickness of MacOSX will be very compelling.
With virtualization support native to the CPU, it will be uber-cool if somebody like VMWare came up with VMWare for OSX. That would make MacOSX/Intel the platform of choice for developers particularly in the web space (test Firefox/IE/Safari from one box).
Did the security drill with WordPress 2.0.2
Firing up my favorite RSS reader NetNewsWire, I saw the WordPress crew had put a security fix update for WordPress.
With the easy upgrade instructions. It was all over in a jiffy
Now back to your regular scheduled programming 🙂
Sun Niagara as an awesome HTTPS offload proxy
Sun has recently released it’s new UltraSparc T1 based systems (aka “Niagara”) boxes. These boxes are basically single CPU boxes but the CPU have 8 cores with each core having 4 hardware threads on them. Solaris 10 sees 32 CPU’s on this box. Workloads which are threaded work very well on these boxes.
The other thing cool about the Sun Niagara is that they have phenomenal RSA performance which seems to be accessible via the SSLCryptoDevice directive to Apache. With Apache 2.2 mod_proxy showing a lot of improvement, this would make Apache with the worker mpm (small number of processes with lots of threads per process) combined with mod_ssl an exciting combination to run.
It seems a bit strange though that Sun is recommending that people compile Apache with the prefork mpm. I guess that might be appropiate if Apache were to be compiled with PHP or some other module but I would expect that for an HTTPS offload workload, then worker might scale better.
The other interesting bit would be to modify Apache Flood to have support for engine(3). This would allow for a very fast threaded ssl aware http benchmark which would take advantage of the RSA speedups within Niagara.
It looks like some Apache committers might be getting their hands on this box soon.
Now, if only there was support for SNI via mod_ssl or if mod_gnutls support engine(3) then these boxes are likely to be no-brainer for ISP’s to host SSL frontends.
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1
I wanted to do this via the one click option offerred by my webhost but in the end decided to do via the old fashioned way of following the instructions in the codex
Upgrade seems to have gone smoothly. Now to investigate the features provided by WordPress 2.0.1
Enabling cheaper SSL hosting
Today the cost of SSL enabled websites increases due to
- cost of doing SSL computations
- The requirement of one IP per hostname hosting SSL
With increasing CPU performance (particularly the AMD Opteron) which totally rule in terms of RSA crypto performance, point (1) is slowly becoming a non-issue. point (b) is still an issue
point (2) is being addressed via Server Name Indication.
which is currently only supported in Opera 8.0.
IE 7/Vista will also support SNI
SNI will make it possible to support virtual SSL hosting on a single IP which would allow more websites to consider end-to-end SSL support
For Mozilla, there are the bugs filed for support of this
Guess which company the engineer works who has the bug assigned to him. You are right, It’s Sun Microsystems.
So here’s a shout-out to the Sun bloggers out there. If you believe that making it easier for webhosters (who may purchase Sun hardware if they find that SSL performance on the Sun Niagara boxes screams to easily host virtual SSL hosts on a single IP is a worthwhile proposition, then I encourage you to evangalize within the organisation to enable the engineering resources within Sun so that Mozilla/Firefox have support for SNI at the earliest.
Remember that a large percentage of the world isn’t going to move to Vista so SNI support in Firefox may even lead to a faster adoption of the browser and help in standard adoption
Yusuf Goolamabbas 