Archive
Posts from 2008
Cleaning up HTML files with tidy
I have read a number of documents on correctly using CSS and XHTML over the past month, and have learned about a number of common mistakes people make when creating content that uses these technologies. Most of the articles discussed ways to structure web content to avoid these pitfalls, which got me wondering if anyone had taken these recommendations and created a tool to analyze content for errors. After a bit of googling, I came across the W3C content validation site, as well as the tidy utility. The W3C website is super easy to use, and it provides extremely useful feedback that you can use to improve your content…
$ read more →Determining the capabilities of a NIC on a Solaris host
There are a myriad of NIC chipsets in use by the major server vendors (Broadcom, Intel, NVidia, etc.), and each chipset typically contains a unique set of capabilities (e.g., hardware offload support, some amount of on board cache devoted to RX / TX rings, hardware flow classification, etc.). To see which capabilities a given NIC chipset supports, you can usually read through the technical white papers and engineering documents that were published when the chipset shipped. To find the NIC chipsets that are in use on a Solaris host, the kstat utility can be run with the the name of a network driver, the instance of the driver, and the "chipid" name: module: bge instance: 0 name: chipid class: net asic_rev 2416115712 bus_size 64 bit bus_speed fast bus_type PCI-X businfo 4746 cache_line_size 16 chip_type 5715 command 342 This will display a number of pieces of information, including the type of BUS in use, whether it is 32- or 64-bit, and the chipset version. In the output above, we can see that a 64-bit PCI express Broadcom model 5715 adapter is in use by the server…
$ read more →OpenSolaris storage wishlist
A number of opensolaris communities have asked their members for feedback, and the list of technologies they would like to see added in the future. The storage community received a ton of feedback when they asked the community for the list of features they would like to have added to opensolaris, and this feedback was recently posted to the genunix wiki. If there are features you are interested in that don't appear on the list, I would highly recommend adding them. There are so many cool things underway (Comstar, CIFS client and server, NPIV support, pNFS, better remote replication, etc.) in the storage community, and it's awesome to see the storage project leaders reaching out to the community to get their ideas!
$ read more →Substituting text in the HTTP request body with mod_substitute
While doing a bit of research tonight I came across a reference to mod_substitute. This nifty module allows you to substitute text in the HTTP request body, which provides an easy way to do things similar to the following: I digs me some Apache!
$ read more →Resources from my Java performance presentation
I gave a presentation last night on debugging Java performance problems. I got a couple of requests to post links to the performance analysis tools I discussed, so here you go: DTraceToolkit Garbage collection log visualization utility Garbage collection visualization utility Java hotspot DTrace provider Java heap profiling agent Monitoring garbage collection with jstat Observing object allocation with DTrace Trending Java performance I would like to thank everyone for attending, and hope to see ya'll at a future meeting!
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