Update November 14th, 2016: This is an old article but my recommendation to hack the NFS file still stand even given how inexpensive small SSDs are. An SSD ZIL still delivers low performance with ESXi/NFS unfortunately. We have have a dual SSD ZIL setup on this file server, and without the NFS hack we still… Read more »
Goodbye MB/GB/TB, Hello MiB/GiB/TiB
Since the popular rise of the personal computer users have asked the time old question: “Why does my 100 gigabyte hard drive only give me 93 gigabytes when I format it?” The answer lies with the 2nd use of the word “gigabyte” in that sentence. In reality when we say “gigabyte” we don’t mean 1,000,000,000 bytes,… Read more »
Using powerd(8) To Increase FreeBSD Performance By Over 10%
Modern Intel CPUs employ a technology called TurboBoost which works in conjunction with Intel’s SpeedStep technology to temporarily overclock specific cores (sometimes at over 2x the advertised speed) when thermal and power limits allow. SpeedStep is the selective and rapid slowing down, idling and possibly even sleeping of cores which are not being used or… Read more »
HOW TO: FreeBSD Partition Alignment for RAID, SSDs & 4k Disk Drives
Last Updated January 21st, 2017. This article is really popular, I’ll do my best to keep it up to date! I’ve added notes about enabling TRIM support. Aligning Partitions Under FreeBSD for Optimum Performance with RAID Arrays, SSDs and 4k Disk Drives Note: These instructions have been verified to work for FreeBSD 9.1, FreeBSD 9.2,… Read more »
HOW TO: Installing FreeBSD with gmirror (software RAID 1) and the GPT partitioning scheme
Last Updated November 14th, 2016: Updated to include that this works under FreeBSD 11.0 as well. Really anything between FreeBSD 9 and 11 should work. April 30th, 2015: This article is really popular, I’ll do my best to keep it up to date! I’ve added notes about TRIM, alignment and GMIRROR (-h) labeling since it… Read more »
SCRIPT: Automatic CouchDB Compaction
As you probably know CouchDB will not automatically reclaim unused space, nor compact or clean up its views during normal operation. Instead these processes are meant to be run at optimal times (ie; off peak hours) so they do not affect user performance during critical periods. Over time this obviously means that any CouchDB can… Read more »
ANSWERED: What is the Best Way to Redirect Web Visitors to My ‘Real’ Website?
Today it’s common to have a single web site but multiple URLs which you want funnel visitors from. For example if you’ve purchased .Net and .Org variations of your domain name you want visitors to see your .Com web site, even if they type in the .Net URL. You also might want to provide a… Read more »
Why I Switched to CouchDB for Web Applications
Top Reasons to Take A Closer Look at CouchDB for Your Next Project I had been looking at MySQL alternatives for some time, and have been watching the “No SQL” movement grow. About a month ago I finally decided to take the plunge and selected CouchDB as the default storage mechanism for my applications moving… Read more »
ANSWERED: How Does My Computer Find a Website?
How Registrars, DNS Servers, and Web Servers Work Together One of the most common questions that arise when migrating customers from one hosting company to another is a variation on this subject. Most people are unaware of the multistage process that occurs between them typing in (for example) http://www.ateamsystems.com/ and the web page being displayed… Read more »
SOLVED: FireFTP / ProFTPd Error ‘Unable to build data connection: Operation not permitted’
After updating ProFTPd on a server running FreeBSD, certain clients (FireFTP specifically) were able to log in, but not transfer files or retrieve a directory listing. The following error was shown to the client user: 425 Unable to build data connection: Operation not permitted It appears that a recent change in ProFTPd’s default TLS handling… Read more »