Performance

 Brave is a web browser that has been about for while, but i only happened across it when it made its way onto the android platform.

It presents another concept which supports web content creators without subjecting viewers to horrendous ads, both in their content and in their speed detriment.

Check their site out here - https://brave.com

Crypto mining failed me (see coin hive here), ads are annoying and more and more likely to be blocked via various plugins and tools. The Brave browser blocks all ads by default and builds up a profile on where you are spending your time on the web. Contributions are then made to the various sites if they are registered to the “BAT” system, which is a way of rewarding the content providers.

    

I just moved my wordpress site to http2 (via https). Some advice on steps to moving your site ;

• Run it behind nginx + lets encrypt - offload ssl certs and get http2 performance
• Setup nginx default to redirect all http -> https
• update your WordPress site to correct URL (via admin / settings / general)  i.e.
• Run WP plug-in to change all media / links to new https links. Else you get mixed secuirty (some http, some https)
  • I used - https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/

Cool. zfs as of version 21 has deduplication built in. And thats the good dedup - synchronous dedup. i.e. deduped on the fly!

How easy is it to turn on? - very!

Once you have upgraded your zpool to 21 or above you can run the following command at the pool level and deduplication will be over all your data from that point onwards.

zpool set dedup=on tank

Done

Note : Watch your performance, it will drop like a rock if you do not have enough ram for your dedup tables. Do some tests after enabling this feature.

I’ve got some old 250Gb drives that are starting to show their age. I’ve currently got them setup in a 3x RAID 0 config which presents about 750Gb of space.

I’ve got everything on a single partition (meh, i’m lazy). I’ve done various speed tests in the current setup (with all space allocated), but i thought i’d re-image onto a short stroke partition.

I only use about 150Gb of space on my main machine (most of my data is on another box), so i’m going to try creating a 200Gb partition to test if this provides any kind of performance boost.

Want iSCSI in opensolaris?

Grab SUNWiscsitgt via package manager.

enable the server via svcadm;

svcadm enable iscsitgt

create your zfs iscsi pool;  (this command will limit iscsi drive to 500GB in size)

zfs create -V 500G tank/iscsi

set isci on via zfs command;

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/iscsi

check that target is up and running;

iscsitadm list target -v

Done. Should be able to connect via ip from another machine. I have not covered CHAP or any client side configuration. Assumed isolated LAN.

This is quite a good diagnostic for checking your disk throughput. Try copying data to and from your zpool while your running this command on the host…

zpool iostat -v unprotected 2

capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool         used  avail   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
unprotected  1.39T   668G     18      7  1.35M   161K
c7d0       696G   403M      1      2  55.1K  21.3K
c9d0       584G   112G      8      2   631K  69.3K
c7d1       141G   555G      8      2   697K  70.0K
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

The above command will keep displaying the above output every 2 seconds (average during that time). I’ve used it a few times to ensure that all disks are being used (in write operations) where needed. Of course read op’s may not be typically across all disks as it will depend where the data is…

Or lack of.

You must insure that your drives are using the sata driver (if they are sata disks), quickest way to check is that they will be called sda sdb etc…. and not hda hdb, as this is the default IDE driver and will slow down the performance majorly.

How to check performance;

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Modern drives should be getting over 50MB/s easily. If your getting about 5MB/s you have the problem.