Viewing profile — bmurphy

Just because you have 16gb of memory doesn't mean you won't ever swap. Firefox is not the only application running on a computer. My working set is routinely over 7gb and I have 8g…

I used MSSQL up to MSSQL 2005 and MySQL up until about the same time. Around then I switched over to PostgreSQL completely and have not had a reason to go back. My biggest complain…

I agree with the parent. Something very simplistic in json or yaml would be preferred.

I can't play it. I've played too many FPS and Flight Simulators in my time. The controls need to be inverted so i can fly it like a real plane. Too bad.

Absolutely. You should always be spreading your data across multiple availability zones and where feasible across multiple data centers and S3 is a great place to store your wal lo…

EBS is a shared networked SAN. The performance characteristics of it are not that great and even worse, highly variable. The last thing you want to be running your database on is a…

Very nice, thank you. Mostly all of this is good advice and correlates nicely with my experience. One thing though: "EBS volumes and Software RAID is best but scary on AWS" I've ma…

Agreed. I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I nev…

Nope, he does not mean open a port. Ports is the name of the packaging system FreeBSD uses, and a port is the equivalent (more or less) of an RPM or deb source package. http://www.…

Nice. Much better.

As the Father of a 19 month old I can only say this is a complete rip-off. Craig's list, friends and family, birthdays, holidays, garage sales, second hand stores, 50% off coupons,…

Argh. Same crap as with all the population predictions. Everybody always assumes the graph is exponential. It is not. It always levels off. The real trick is predicting where/when …

You could always replace it with an EBS volume.

I don't have solid numbers, just some experience using this. Ephemeral drives outright fail more often than EBS volumes, however, EBS volumes suffer performance degradation signifi…

My experience has been that EBS handles concurrent loads better, ephemeral drives handle non-concurrent loads better. Transferring 100gb+ of data on EBS (even with an 8x RAID) is a…

I tuned the hell out of our big postgresql instance a year ago, but I'll be damned if I can remember the rational for every change. I have a list of all the changes from default, b…

Yes. Except, anybody who is doing RAID-0 over an EBS volume for perf reasons is ASKING for trouble. You need to do RAID-10. EBS volumes CAN and DO fail.

Having been running a 200gb millions of transactions per day Postgres cluster on Amazon's EC2 cloud for two years now, I can attest to the fact that EBS performance and reliability…

That song is terrible (and I love Devin Townsend, the singer).

Interesting, but I really don't think this belongs here.

Disk I/O performance that doesn't suck. Let us add dev pay instances to an ELB. More ram. Elastic private ip addresses. Change security groups of running instances. I have a lot mo…

You're right. But it's not happening now. I don't see it. Who are the alternatives everybody is flocking to? They don't exist. Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful for a new world of op…

There are no Facebook alernatives. My friends and family are on Facebook. They are not on ANYTHING else. Until that changes, which I suspect it won't, nothing else will be viable.

I just ran the same test. Set up a 2 slave cluster, killed slave 2, then killed the master. Ran pg_last_xlog_receive_location on each slave, picked the one that was furthest along …

Yes, that's exactly what I was referring to, you're getting a new timeline. You need to rebase the slaves and you have no real-time backup for a few hours. Sucks. You have to be ve…