In this day and age, many people use multi screens in their setup. I’m one of those people. One thing that really bugs me in OS X however, is that you cannot set one wallpaper to expand beyond one screen. Let’s say you have two screens with 1920×1080 resolution and you have found a wallpaper of the appropriate dimension (ie. 3840×1080). Interfacelift got …
I recently posted a rather lengthy article titled “High availability with PostgreSQL, PGPool-II and FreeBSD.” The article was a bi-product of setting this up and the blog-post was simply my own notes with some polish. Little did I know when I started this that I would end up having to write this much code to make the system behave the way I wanted. While …
Recently I wrote a post titled ‘Notes on MongoDB, GridFS, sharding and deploying in the cloud.’ I talked about various aspects of running MongoDB and how to scale it. One thing we really didn’t take into consideration was if MongoDB performed differently on different operating systems. I naively assumed that it would perform relatively similar. That was a …
I’m a big fan of FreeBSD. However, as painful it is to admit, it isn’t always the best OS to run in the cloud. Compared to Linux, you will get worse network and disk performance even with Virtio installed. There are also other issues. For instance, it is likely that you won’t get CARP to fully work (while this works perfectly fine with OpenBSD’s CARP, and …
About two years ago I started working on a project called Red iGone together with a friend and we started the company Devify. The objective of the first project was simple — we wanted to make it easy to remove red eyes from photos. We didn’t see any good solution in the market place that was both fast and easy to use. Red iGone was born as a web-app and it …
I’ve already posted about the fact that we’ve released a massive update to YippieMove. Today the legendary Silicon Valley-blog TechCrunch covered this in form of an interview with me. You can read the full interview here.
A large part of last year spent working on a major update to YippieMove. The new YippieMove is a complete redesign, from the bottom-up. That means new logo, new user interface and an improved back-end. It has never been easier to move email data across multiple email accounts and services. We’re really proud of this release, and we think we’ve made a major …
We‘ve been using MongoDB in production for about six months with YippieMove. It’s been an interesting experience and we’ve learned a lot. Contrary to many MongoDB deployments, we primarily use it for storing files in GridFS. We switched over to MongoDB after searching for a good distributed file system for years. Prior to MongoDB we used a regular NFS share, …
I’m a coffee junkie. Like many of my fellow geeks, I consume way more than the average person. On a normal day, I drink somewhere between 5-10 cups perhaps. How much is that in relation to the population at large? To find the answer, let’s turn to Wikipedia’s List of countries by coffee consumption per capita. Let’s assume that all the data in there are …
In the previous post, I benchmarked three different virtual network drivers under FreeBSD. The clear winner was, perhaps not very surprisingly, the VirtIO network driver. In this article I will do some further benchmarking and try to optimize the driver further. Similarly to in the last post, I will use two FreeBSD 9.0 boxes with 2GB RAM and 2GHz CPU. Both …
With the launch of FreeBSD 9, I was curious to learn how the VirtIO driver performed. I’ve seen a significant boost in disk performance, but how about the network driver? Luckily, that’s rather easy to find the answer to. I spun up two FreeBSD 9 nodes on CloudSigma and configured them with VirIO (just like in this guide) and a private network. Once they were …
Some time ago, I wrote about how to use Virtio with FreeBSD 8.2. As I pointed out in the article, the performance was not nearly as good in FreeBSD 8.2 as it was in 9.0-RC1. Hence I wanted to get all my nodes over to 9.0 as soon as possible to take use of the massive boost in I/O performance. In this article I will walk you through the process of updating an …