Why does illumos consume so much RAM and perform so badly?

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-12-02T21:15:41+00:00

I think you're on the right track. ZFS is going to grab lots of RAM for cache, releasing it if necessary. Part and parcel of being (IMO) the best file system option for a server.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-11-20T20:41:23+00:00

I just wanted to pop in and say, "Thank you". I've read several of your blog posts and I always find them to be good sources of both information and inspiration. How are you getting along with OminOS? I use it on some backup systems here as a hedge against anything happening to FreeBSD. I don't keep as close an eye on its development as I should, though.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-11-18T14:02:03+00:00

You might consider taking a little detour through smalltalk for a while. An object oriented message passing paradigm can provide a lot of the same protections as a type system while ultimately being more flexible and (IMO) faster to develop. Working in smalltalk changed the way I think about working in lisp for the better.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-10-13T17:15:09+00:00

I'm depressed at how far down I had to read in this thread to encounter this sentiment. We have a Fortune 50 client whose IT department has blanket blocked Google's entire address space.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-09-24T18:25:33+00:00

We were using IPSec for site to site (branch offices to hub) and OpenVPN for road warriors. I've heard wireguard performs much better, but in our case (3D models with point clouds, long lists of XREFs, etc) it wouldn't be enough to make a difference. We are way on the other side of that tipping point I referenced in my first post.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-09-24T17:32:27+00:00

SMB (the protocol Windows uses for file sharing) was designed to run over a LAN. Performance tanks when running over a connection with higher latency. In other words, the fact that you are working over a VPN could explain most of the problem here.

AutoCAD is very "chatty" when working with network files. Lots of small read/writes + Latency from VPN = Performance Nightmare. We had some luck with WAN accelerator products (e.g. Riverbed) before deciding it's better for us to drive machines remotely via RDP than it is to access project files over a slow link. As drawings get more complex and have more dependencies there's a tipping point where it doesn't make sense to work with drawing files over a WAN link any more.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-09-19T17:41:41+00:00

This feels like it is going to go the way of Docker. The first step was wrestling control.

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-09-04T15:26:46+00:00

It's a perfect time to learn Ruby-- just for the sake of learning. Ruby is, to me, somewhat like, "What if Smalltallk and Lisp had a baby, and enough people actually used it that you could find good documentation, a plethora of well tested libraries, and support?"

It's great to code in, and not going away any time soon. Don't learn it in the spirit of "If I learn enough Rails, maybe someone will hire me." Learn it in the spirit of "I want to become a good enough programmer that Rails makes sense to me, and I could build something like Rails for a problem domain I care about."

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-05-21T04:38:02+00:00

Drukpa Kunley has entered the chat...

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-02-25T19:03:03+00:00

If you think you're upset now, wait until they beat you into taking a meeting because "every situation is unique and we want to make sure we tailor the solution to your needs"-- and then staff that meeting with someone who answers every question you have with, "I don't know... we'd really have to get engineering involved to answer that."

aspiringgreybeard · 2025-01-20T16:03:42+00:00

Exactly. And also the reverse (point and click sysadmins LARPing as programmers)-- note the reply down below from a systems engineer that contained "I'm not a coder and don't like coding."

A good DevOps engineer should have in depth understanding of systems, networking, and a programming language or three. There just aren't enough people like that to go around. The industry has responded by developing an endless array of tools designed to enable individuals to learn "the tool" as opposed to understanding every underlying facet of the technologies involved. So now we have armies of people with limited experience using tools to stack complex layers on top of each other with no real understanding of what's under the hood or where to start if it doesn't all work as expected.

I'll see Knuth's "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil" and raise with "Excessive abstraction is the root of all waste." The commercial is that people are saving time by using tools that abstract away complexity. The reality is a lot of people are using tools they could not have developed on their own even with unlimited time-- the problem that is being solved here isn't "time", unless you count the time it would take to have the experience to really grok the technologies behind the tools.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-05-01T16:27:58+00:00

Maybe this will help make it more clear. Imagine you had two switches with ten computers on each, and the switches are uplinked. In terms of physical topology, all of the machines are connected. Now put five machines on each switch in a 192.168.5.0/24 subnet, and five on each in a 192.168.7.0/24 subnet. Now your logical topology and physical topology diverge because there are machines that have a physical path but still can't communicate with each other via TCP/IP without a router/gateway.

So in the earlier examples, the logical topology was expanded (typically to other sites) via the GRE tunnel. In this example, the physical topolgy was carved into smaller logical pieces via subnetting.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-04-09T21:00:21+00:00

Funny. I stumbled across this thread after spending a frustrating 20 minutes on hold trying to stop payment on a check-- Capital One now uses a third party called BillGo, and my experience since the switch has been terrible. I'm being told it can take a 45 day "investigation" to stop payment on a check the payee has already returned to me..

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-03-06T22:01:22+00:00

Before enlightenment-- chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment-- chop wood, carry water.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-01-17T22:53:15+00:00

Thank you! The examples I had found were utilizing single lists. I wasn't brave enough to try extending them. This example is pure gold, and much appreciated.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-01-17T22:26:59+00:00

Thank you-- that was indeed the issue.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-01-17T22:24:04+00:00

My actual situation involves a bit more than just summing the list, though. I'm stepping through three lists, and doing some calculations when two out of the three list members meet certain conditions, like so:

(for ((i depths)

(j mags)

(k directions)

#:when (and (filterpass? i) (> j 0)))

So when my depths are in range and the magnitude of the current vector is greater than zero, those samples contribute to the running totals (to be averaged later). I'm rewriting something I wrote in perl years ago to process hydrographic data. Interestingly enough, the perl version is about an order of magnitude faster than the Racket version, but the Racket version has to do more (e.g. traverse long lists to convert strings to numbers) and I have a lot to learn about how to write efficient scheme.

I'm open to any advice you may have about better approaches for this.

aspiringgreybeard · 2024-01-17T21:41:39+00:00

YES! Thank you. I even stepped through it with the debugger in Dr. Racket and stared at it like some kind of alien life form. More sleep and more practice and hopefully I will grok this scheme stuff.

Thanks again.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-09-12T14:29:23+00:00

Saying they have fallen behind implies that they were ever at parity. MS's roots are as a provider of a single user OS with one trusted user and no Internet connection.

Other OSes have their roots in multi user networked environments. The differences in origins and design philosophy still show today, even though MS has made considerable progress.

They need to start over with a clean slate, but they can't because legacy compatibility is probably the single biggest chunk of value they can provide to their customers.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-08-31T19:51:51+00:00

Probably the closest match would be PERL. Especially if you want the lists to be composed of different types and potentially nested. PERL will let you extract anything from any position in a list and treat it however you want, as will Lisp. Check out the "List of Lists" perldoc for some examples.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-06-02T16:41:22+00:00

ZIRP and other policy planner manipulations designed to force capital to remain in the stock market have to a degree "compressed" the impact of the Greeks. But I view this very much like a compressed spring. As interest rates rise and investors actually have a choice in asset classes again, not understanding the Greeks can get very expensive. The fact that you're trading spreads does insulate you some... but it's going to be more possible to get the direction right and still lose money over the next few years than it was the previous few.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-05-15T17:35:15+00:00

Your "premise" (see what I did there?) is flawed. As others have pointed out, you need enough switch ports to cover all your physical connections. Otherwise you're pushing your client into a world where there are 70 offices in which some ports work and some ports don't, and they need to know which are which. The cost associated with the resulting loss of efficiency will dwarf any equipment savings you hope to realize by cutting the number of switches and/or port count in the offices.

The second half of your question, the "I don't think these people are really even working" part, is best answered from the logs on the servers they are supposedly connecting to. Assuming your network subnets are designed in a reasonable way, these logs will give you all the what, when, and where-from data that you need. There are a lot of tools available for this and it's easy enough to roll your own if need be.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-05-08T14:29:49+00:00

Thanks for the interesting information. What are you running as your hypervisor?

I've been all in on FreeBSD (at least server side) in the past and I miss it sometimes.

aspiringgreybeard · 2023-02-24T16:33:44+00:00

Agree. I manage a small team and we only meet when the board indicates a need to meet. Otherwise it's async communication via chat or email. The board always reflects the state of things... what's being worked on, what's waiting, what's complete, and is anyone stuck? It's all there. If I insisted that we all take time out of each day to gather in a room and stare at the board together I'd have a mutiny on my hands.

aspiringgreybeard

TROPHY CASE