Somewhere out there!

How Intel’s New Xeons Help Virtualization – Technology News by ExtremeTech

On Monday, Intel launched its “Dunnington” six-core processor, AKA the “Xeon 7400,” designed to dramatically improve the performance of virtualization applications.

These new 6 core processors will be interesting, increase potential processing density to match the reduced cost of memory dentisty.

From Storagemojo:

 

Some significant differences from prior studies:

• Workloads more write oriented. Read/write byte ratios and are now only 2 to 1 compared to the 4-1 or higher ratios reported earlier.
• Workloads less read-centric. Read/write workloads are now 30x more common.
• Most bytes transferred sequentially. These runs are 10x the length found in the old studies.
• Files 10x bigger.
• Files live 10x longer. Less than half are deleted within a day of creation.

Cool new findings

• Files rarely re-opened. Over 66% are re-opened once and 95% fewer than 5 times.
• Over 60% of file re-opens are within a minute of the first open.
• Less than 1% of clients account for 50% of requests.
• Infrequent file sharing. Over 76% of files are opened by just 1 client.
• Concurrent file sharing very rare. As the prior point suggests, only 5% of files are opened by multiple clients and 90% of those are read only.
• Most file types have no common access pattern.

Another interesting finding: 91% of VMWare Virtual Disk (vmdk) files accesses were small sequential reads – not the larger sequential accesses I’d expect.

And there’s this: over 90% of the active storage was untouched during the study. That makes it official: data is getting cooler.

Redhat has acquired Qumranet the developers of KVM. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Linux virtualisation world.

I haven’t tried KVM yet as I’ve been too busy and Xen is more mature – but many of the accounts I’ve read seem to indicate that for Linux its performance is very good maybe better in some cases than Xen. Management is another issue, but that is just a matter of time and development enegry.

From lwn.

I’ve been playing around with Chrome from Google for a short while and what I’ve seen so far I like.

Best feature to me so far is the seperate memory spaces for each tab – I actually like this idea. Firefox is a real PITA when it comes to memory. Especially on a laptop with long running firefox processes, and being able to kill a tab and see the memory completely go is good. I’m not sure how exactly Chrome works – but if the application code is cached and only the data specific to each tab is in separate process and memory space then it is probably efficient enough.

It will be interesting when more of the plugins from Firefox get portable or written for Chrome. I’d also like to see a portable version.

Check out the Chrome Book at Google Books – has some useful information.

For now I think I will be using Chrome and Firefox together. Chrome is definitely a very good replacement for Prism which still suffers from Firefox issues. Running Gmail in Chrome with application shortcuts is very easy. And the method is uses to load links from Gmail and GReader in the main window is very cool.