How did I halve my Build speeds?... Oh

Deconstructing my build hive... As you may tell form earlier posts this month, I'm on a mission to sort out some of my equipment and either recycle it or whatever, and on this mission one of the first stops has been the older dual socket servers, which live in the garage on an ethernet spur at the moment.

And, I've taken them down, now I didn't really appreciate how much they lent to my build times, as my main app server (on which I coordinate the building of gcc projects with distcc) started to report 4x longer builds (on average) and I couldn't find a reason for it.

I looked at the app server, I looked at the jobs being thrown about and really there was no reason for the massive slow down...

Until I remembered something about my VDI set up, the app server used two sources for it's virtual disk images, one local and one was passed over to the containers on the garage servers, these images could be mounted over NFS but more regularly I had the garage servers sync them and mount locally from their local disks.

In migrating the build containers back locally to the app server, I'd moved the containers from their local loop mounted VDI's to ones hosted on the app server... From being mounted from 15,000 RPM SAS disks at about 12gb/s to a SATA 7,200 RPM disk at 6gb/s.

I'd essentially halved the disk speed of my builds, and totally forgot about setting this all up, now I did this years ago, it must be about two years since I set it up and it's been nearly a year since I moved house and started everything back up on the ethernet spur, which necessitated using the copy/sync and local mount option to get over the slow 10mbs ethernet in the garage.

My plan therefore is to get the new power supply, experiment with the supermicroo motherboard and then see if I can set up a new ZFS based file server on that SAS controller... Watch this space.

Reaching Out & Being Pushed Back

I've spent the last few days talking to a few companies I'd love to partner with, to bring you more reviews.  Now, on the internet we already have a lot of gaming related or performance reviews, but I was inspired more about the idea of working environment, development cycles, or throughput for the worker.

I'm interested in things like cables, drives, storage, cases and also the main centre piece of your working time, the machine itself.

I tried to speak to Intel, and was given a pretty flat "you're too small"... Believe it or not, 400,000 of you have passed through these pages in the six years they've been running (thank you so much), and by far the most popular posts are my programming tutorials, followed closely by the reviews.

Combining the two, could only be a win-win situation!

I have today therefore, sent missives to AMD, Asus and nVidia.  I've also sent online messages to some smaller storage firms, like Xstra in the EU and Kingpin.

It is actually quite hard to find UK based reviews of items, often you can be watching coverage of some great ideas from US sources, only to find either the items are not available or they cost an absolute fortune compared to US prices.

What else am I up to this week?... Well, I had a long researched article in the fire, it was related to my uncovering of several cheaters on US based IT courses, at least the US students were the only ones silly enough to get caught by myself.  However, during my uncovering of this situation one of the colleges in question took extreme exception to my posting about their students activities, and they slapped me with a "cease & desist" order.

Their order only covers publishing any names in the US, but my problem is, I can't prove conclusively who the students in question were, so if only one person out of a class of 29 were cheating in the manner I uncovered, then by just posting the name of the course or college, I would be defaming the innocent twenty nine; not something I want to do at all.

So, for now that article, as interesting as it was is on hiatus, and I can only thank the other three colleges and lecturers whom got back to me, however briefly, for your time and frank disclosures.