(This article also available in german language .)

So you have a new system and want to know what the load limits are. For that you want to run a benchmark.

Basic Benchmarking

The main plan looks like this:

The basic idea: Find a box, offer load, see what happens, learn.

You grab a box and find a method to generate load. Eventually the box will be fully loaded and you will notice this somehow.

Following a great idea from their friends at GitLab, Soup.io loses all postings since 2015 because of malfunctioning backups. They write :

We had a big database crash, and the backups we had were corrupted. The only working backup was from 2015.

Also, TIL soup.io still exists.

Meanwhile, Gitlab posted a blameless postmortem . You can read it online , and they write:

Improving Recovery Procedures […] 9. Automated testing of recoveri PostgreSQL database backups (#1102 ) […]

Die Krone der Sterne (German Edition), Kai Meyer, 12.99 EUR (Kindle)

“Die Krone der Sterne” (The Crown of the Stars) is the first book in a series by Kai Meyer, establishing a setting, the players and the mood.

We are thrown into a decaying, galaxy spanning empire with a distinct Dune like flair. Tech is always huge, somewhat clunky and unreliable, covered in rust, dirt, runes and unnecessary decoaration, and it operates on principles that are never explained and also not really understood by it’s users - it has been inherited by previous, more advanced generations and today’s people can barely operate it.

Felix Gessert does a postmortem of the failed Parse startup and product: “The AWS and MongoDB Infrastructure of Parse: Lessons Learned ”.

Technical problem II: the real problem and bottleneck was not the API servers but almost always the shared MongoDB database cluster.

And that was with MongoRocks (Mongo on RocksDB) and replacing the initial app in Ruby with a Go implementation of said thing, with WriteConcern = 1, and other horrible presets. All in all, this is like the perfect nightmare of startup architecture decisions. Felix closes pointing at his current project:

DVZ Landverkehr reports (article in German):

LKW-Fahrer dürfen ihre wöchentliche Ruhezeit nicht im Fahrzeug verbringen. Zu diesem Ergebnis kommt Generalanwalt Evgeni Tanchev in seinen Schlussanträgen vom 2. Februar vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof (EuGH). Hintergrund ist die Klage des Transportunternehmens Vaditrans gegen den Belgischen Staat.

(“Truck drivers must not spend their weekly downtime within the vehicle. That’s the conclusion drawn by general attorney Evgeni Tanchev in his final plea of Feb, 2nd before the ECJ. Background is a complaint of Vaditrans vs. Belgium”)

Continual improvement is sometimes hard to see, because each iteration, each incremental step itself is tiny so that the actual change escapes our attention. Also, just living our lives, our time sense is sometimes distorted. Me for example, I was almost 30 already in the late Nineties, and while that is already 20 years ago, it feels like yesterday to me. So car safety in the Nineties, compared to now? It was crap. Check this out:

The talk

The cgroups-v2 API is incompatible with cgroups-v1. This is a good thing, because the initial use cases for cgroups have not been fleshed out properly, and the API is kind of overly complicated from the POV of the consumers. v2 is being built with use cases and experience in mind, and is much easier to use. Control groups allow Linux users to limit the kind and amount of resources being used, which is employed by systemd, container drivers and many other things.

Commodore 64, Evan-Amos @ Wikipedia

As Moore’s Law shows signs of coming to an end, the Guardian has an article about the history of computing from the Intel 4004 to current tech, and how with the Internet of Shit and Chips and Networking in everything, all of our computers are becoming just one computer.

Everyone knows that modern computers are better than old ones. But it is hard to convey just how much better, for no other consumer technology has improved at anything approaching a similar pace. The standard analogy is with cars: if the car from 1971 had improved at the same rate as computer chips, then by 2015 new models would have had top speeds of about 420 million miles per hour.

Lidar Image

Two articles about the Maya civilization: Seeker article about LiDAR being used to reveal ancient structures on the Jungle ground: A network of 150km of prehistoric Autobahn ran through the Jungle, binding the Mayan Empire together.

“These causeways are 130 feet wide, up to 20 feet high and in some cases they extend as far as 25 miles,” Hansen said.

A causeway is a raised road across difficult, often wet or unstable ground. Because of the raised structure LiDAR can find these roads even today.

Inside Science reports on the congestion charge in Stockholm (Link to actual paper ). Stockholm always has been a city with relatively clean air and PM10 and NOx levels well below limits. The introduction of a congestion charge in 2007 reduced air pollution in Stockholm by approximately 10 percent. Yet, after several years, Asthma in children 0-5 years old is reduced of 45 percent.

“It appears that what they’ve found is these cumulative effects of pollution,” he said.