Notes from the Main Sequence: Eric Reid - Sun ISV Engineering

Back to enthusiasm, commitment, transparency, and making a difference at Sun. I survived 10 July 2008 @ SUNW.

The tune I've been listening to this evening: 'This is the Life', by Living Colour. This song has never failed to lift me up and help me face a new day. Living Colour just F'in rocks. And please, no comments about that other studly Living Colour tune, Cult of Personality... tempting, I know, at the moment, but let's Not Go There, Shall We?

FY09 -- it's here.

===
This is the Life
Lyrics reprinted without permission.

In another life
You might have been a genius
In another life
You might have been a star
In another life
Your face might have been perfect
In another life
You'd drive a better car

In another life
All your jokes are funny
In another life
Your heart is free from fear
In another life
You make a lot of money
In this other life
Everything is clear

In another life
You're always the hero
In another life
You always win the game
In another life
No one ever cheats you
In another life
You never have to change

In another life
Your friends never desert you
In another life
You never have to cry
In another life
No one ever hurts you
In this other life
Your loved-ones never die

But this is the life you have
This is the life you have
This is the life you have
This is the life

In another life
You're always the victim
In another life
You're always the thief
In another life
You are always lonely
In this other life
There is no relief

In your real life
Treat it like it's special
In your real life
Try to be more kind
In your real life
Think of those that love you
In this real life
Try to be less blind

One of my heroes, dead at 90.
 

Hawai'i Info Alert!! The Reid Guide to Making Kona Vacations Easier

Saturday... the jet lag lessening... the morning dawns sunny, and we decide to check out another snorkeling location, up north of the Kona Airport... Kuki'o Beach isn't all that well-known, and the snorkeling is wonderful, the beach is white pristine sand, and the coral relatively undamaged... we had a lovely time, and didn't overstay our time in the Sun...

Driving around.. exploring, hitting up Border's, L&L, then back to the hotel... deciding to attend 5PM Mass at St. Michael's, which we'd found on our last trip here... but when we got there, we see a large white tent in the parking lot.. turns out an recent earthquake led to the the condemnation of the building... so, Mass outside, with traffic noise and town noise and the tropical breezes and not a little sweating... different, to be sure...

Afterwards, a walk around town, and Grace's first experience with real Hawaiian shave ice (note, 'shave', not 'shaved').. three flavors on a snowball seemingly as big as your head (and, no, thank goodness, she didn't try to finish the whole thing)... 

Dinner at a nice little Thai place in the local shopping center, then another early night.

OK, OK... I know you're asking yourself, "what? he can't blog in real-time?"... well, no, I can't always... but I am getting to it, with benefit of some collective recollections and notes and pics...

Although the day before was a long one, and sleep came quickly that night, we all awoke several times through the night, finally getting up around 5:30... the local roosters (hey, it's a mixed-used area, even if it is at the beach) weren't to greet the sun for another hour...

Now, then... some particulars on where we were, before I continue... we spent this entire vacation on the Big Island of Hawai'i (aka Hawai'i :), on the western coast, aka the Kona Coast... our hotel, the Keauhou Outrigger, lay about 6 miles south of the town of Kailua-Kona, on the beach itself... Google Maps and/or Google Earth might be useful if you decide to continue reading these entries...

This first day, we decided to treat ourselves to the buffet breakfast... this was to be the exception, not the rule, as we didn't really wish to be rolled out of Kona with overfull tummies and smaller wallets (buffets are convenient but expensive)... breakfast is served on a balcony, over an ocean tidepool... from there you can see colorful tropical fish, green sea turtles (more about them later), and other live ocean critters... the sun usually comes up over the hills to the east, while the ocean is to the west... mornings usually dawn cloudy and in the upper 60s [around 20C for those of you in the rest of the world]... all in all a pleasant way to start a day in paradise...

Our morning then shifted to the pool for a bit... then our first excursion of the trip... down the coast 10 miles or so to the Greenwell Farms Coffee Plantation... some of the richest coffee on the planet... all grown right there at around 1500' [450m] in the cooler hillside mists and sun... we saw coffee 'cherries' on the trees, harvested, drying, cracked open to get the bean itself... there were also fruit trees and chameleons on the grounds, free coffee tasting, etc... we left with some ground coffee for the room, green beans to try roasting ourselves at home, and dark chocolate-covered beans for the shear decadence of it all, especially later in the day, when the five-hour time difference hit us...

From there, we headed back north, into town, where we first hit Snorkel Bob's... now, you need to know that Snorkel Bob Cares... he does, and he says so on every snorkel kit he rents out... after securing three kits, we quickly hit the local Farmer's Market to check out everything from fresh fruit to puka shell necklaces to mu'umu'us... then a return to the hotel to change and head next door to Kahalu'u Bay Beach for snorkelling... a nice beach and some nice fish in the bay, but waaaaay overused, and as a result all the coral in the bay is dead... this bay needs some time to recover, but it doesn't sound like local governments will ever restrict access to allow this to happen.. clear waters, lots of fish, and, as usual, a couple of the local Green Sea Turtles (aka Honu)... these turtles are gentle, not too afraid of people if you're nice to them, and graceful as the flap and float in the water next to you...

Hawai'i Info Alert!! All the Hawaiian Islands were created as the result of volcanic activity... so, all the rock is volcanic rock (cooled lava), and any soil is the based on said volcanic rock... all rocks you see, even these at the beach, are rough, pointy, full of air holes, black...

After dinner and showers, we saw a party being held on the grounds down in front of our lanai (balcony)... turned out to be a going-away party, complete with hula dancers and authentic Hawaiian music... Grace even took some video with sound on her phone...

We didnt' last long that night, crashing around 8PM....

Our long-awaited vacation... one week on the Kona Coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i... with 11-year-old in tow...

We awake at 0600 and 19 degrees F and pack up and head to the airport, only to find our flight is delayed... and then delayed some more when they find the plane is overweight and 4 people must stay behind... then the ground crew is seen outside on a cellphone, presumably asking someone What To Do... Oi!... then we have to de-ice... long story short, we miss our connection in Chicago... so instead of the short flight from Kalamazoo followed by a 10-hour flight to Kona, we're rebooked on a flight to LA, a three-hour layover, then a 5-hour flight to Kona.

This, kids, is a lot of airplane travel in one day.

We arrive in Kona at 8PM, three and a half hours later than planned.. Grace: "Ewwww! Bugs!!"... Us: "Ahhhh! 75 degrees!!".. Mustang convertibles are wonderful unless you have three people and all their luggage.

That sound you hear is three very tired people crashing at 10PM Hawaii time (3AM Eastern time), and  sleeping in til 6AM the next day.

Aloha, Hawai'i!

Hawai'i Info Alert!! Some basic terms when you visit Hawai'i:

Guess this makes me a quasi-albino:

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/01/blue_eyes_mutation/

I think we should organize a Blue Eyed Human Descendant reunion this summer... perhaps a pig roast... oh, and some good jazz music!


 

Everyone has seen the Sun/MySQL news now. A strong commitment to Open Source Sofware, Open Source RDBMS, MySQL users current and future, and especially SaMp (Solaris Apache MySQL PHP). But don't take my word for it... this blog entry today caught my eye, echoes my probably biased sentiments, and tips a hat to one of the more clever Sci-Fi movies of the past 20 years, The Fifth Element.

I remember I blogged last year that I did Open Source... I suspect that, henceforth, I will be doing Open Source bigtime...
 

I posted final numbers today as to how Drupal 5 performs on a small Sun server, comparing Solaris 10 to SLES 10 (two of the OS offerings available from Sun on this server). The intent of this test was to see how Drupal behaved under increasing load (in this case, Guest hits on the Main Page). I'm pleased to report that Solaris (with the latest CoolStack) appears to provide better throughput, better response time, and lower incidence of 'Server Busy' errors under load.

Let me, at this point, state for the record.. yes, I would have published these results even if the outcome had been the other way 'round. One of the rules we live by in Sun ISV Engineering Open Source is that of transparency. If we set out to test something, it's to determine and share the reality, not the spin. We had a hunch that CoolStack would provide a huge performance improvement, but that was only a hunch. I'm sure that, at some point in the future, we could also find that a well-tuned Drupal-on-LAMP offering meets or beats this Solaris performance - it is, after all, the same hardware.

Lots more Drupal testing to come from from us in the weeks and months to come. Wanna see something in particular? Let us know here or here or right here in the Blog Comments!

 

A new week, a new OpenSolaris install experience...

Picked up a new replacement 'everything' server last week, a Shuttle SN68SG2. The intent is to upgrade my main work server, and take advantage of some latest technologies:

• Multi-core lower-power AMD CPU
• OpenSolaris xVM technology for virtualization right on top of hardware hypervisor
• Gigabit Ethernet (I tend to schlep a lot of big .iso images from box to box here)

So I tricked this box out (under $500!) as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.5GHz, dual-core, 65W) CPU
• 2 x 2GB DDR2 400 memory
• 250GB SATA disk

Installing the latest Nevada (nv78), went fairly well, except for the NIC. The rundown:

• CPU/memory: works (frkit isn't happy with dual-core, but that's a known issue)
  
• SATA: works!
• Audio: not yet tested [update: it works]
  
• USB 2.0: works
• Firewire: not yet tested
• Onboard graphics: works great with bundled nVidia driver, driving 1680x1050 Benq monitor
• Onboard NIC (nVidia 630a chipset): 'nge' driver did not recognize this chipset, but Murayama-san's 'nfo' 2.X driver does (once again, Arigato Gozaimashita, Murayama-san!)

Time for an err shoutout to the folks behind the Faban benchmarking kit. And a special thank-you to Akara for helping me with the fhb tool in an ongoing capacity.

While the Faban package and its web-based interface is quite useful, the fhb tool is especially handy for us in our Drupal testing -- it's command-line, Java-based and logs '90% response time' (not just average response time). It was used for our first, preliminary Drupal SAMP-vs-LAMP scaling tests, and we're planning to use it a lot more in the future (beware, Akara :)

Check out Faban, check out our testing results on the Drupal-on-Sun Wiki, and keep watching this space! 

Letter, we get letters...

Numerous parties inside and outside of Sun ask use 'how does Drupal perform on Solaris vs Linux?' Reasonable question, to be sure, but upon further examination, we find a minefield fraught with potential peril...

• What constitutes a 'typical' Drupal database? Well, it doesn't hurt to start with something along the lines of what Dries Buytaert himself described earlier this year
  
• What constitutes a 'typical' Drupal workload? Again, Dries and others have some good starting ideas, some of which we've already tried, some of which will take time to implement properly in our framework
• How to conduct a good 'apples-to-apples' performance comparison?
• Most importantly, how to present and defend results in an open and transparent fashion, given we're comparing Sun against 'non-Sun' platforms?

And to answer your question, YES, I'd be interested in your comments on the subject! We are still learning as we go here...

In any event, we needed to start somewhere, so today I'm publishing some very preliminary results showing Drupal 5 performance (scaling, really) on Solaris vs Linux. The intent here is to show how Drupal performs as the number of concurrent users increases, using as close to 'stock' SAMP and LAMP configurations as possible (on identical hardware).

What did we find? Well, it appears that Drupal-on-SAMP performs and scales significantly better than Drupal-on-LAMP. Please note the operative word here -- APPEARS. We are in no way 'declaring a winner' at this point, for several reasons, not the least of which being the need for high certainty on our part and high believability on the reader's part.

Take a look for yourself.. comment.. complain... suggest. We very much want feedback on what we're doing at this point. You'll note that the results published on the Wiki are purely objective observations, with NO interpretation. It's too early for that, because we still need to be SURE of what we're seeing, we need to understand WHY we're seeing it, and we need to what it all really MEANS (as the intent is NOT to sell Sun here - that's the job of others at Sun).

Look for more refined results, as well as other Drupal-on-Sun performance testing, in the weeks to come.
 

Sun this week announced the StorageTek 5800 - it's a new approach to storage, especially for the retrieval of archived data. Product info here, good writeups here, here and here. 

Why am I blogging about this? Simply put, I'm also supporting several OSS Communities that will be working with this product/technology, and what better time/place to talk about it than at the launch of this storage product. By building in clustered storage and a metadata layer, this box will change the way very large archived datastores are accessed.

The Communities you'll be hearing about from me in the future:   

•  Fedora Repository
•  DSpace
•  EPrints

http://wikis.sun.com/display/Drupal/Home

Do you run Drupal on Sun? Are you considering it? This is the place to post, to contribute, to ask, to whine, to blue-sky.

Check out the first contribution from the FreshBrain.org team, detailing what and why they're using Drupal-on-Sun.
 

Finally got around to trying the OpenSolaris Developer Preview (aka Project Indiana) this morning... it's cool, it's partial, it's a step in the Right Direction... what really caught my eye was that I could place this CD-sizes image on USB Flash Drives and Boot Live... and it Just Worked in seconds... although on my Toshiba Satellite A205:

  1) Sound doesn't work
  2) Time of day wasn't correct (or asked for initially)

But, really, it's not disappointing at all for Preview 1... I like it!