December 13th, 2009 Category: General
A simple and free tool for private usage is available from simplie Software. It lets you run short and long benchmarks of your hard discs and compare the result with other hard discs from a database.
For me it is a sufficient tool as I wanted to compare the overall performance of two different hard discs.
There is also a online shop to buy the software for commercial use.
Links
Written on December 13, 2009 | Posted in
General
September 12th, 2009 Category: General
Found a few tips on support.microsoft.com how to improve the performance of Windows Vista. Checking my Windows 7 installation it seems that these tips seem also apply to Windows 7. Unfortunately I could not found the English version of this support entry (KB954980), only in German language, but I think it should be understandable because of the many pictures:
Basically the article describes 4 things which help to improve the performance:
- Part 2: Improve boot time using Windows ReadyBoost
- Part 3: Disable Windows Aero
- Part 4: Use extended hard disc write cache
- Part 5: Disable unused hardware
On my Windows 7 installation I followed item 1. and 3. Think I have to make further checks how much it improves performance.
Especially item 1. ReadyBoost sounds interesting: Windows uses a USB stick or flash memory card to as additional cache. But I don’t want to use a USB stick, I want to use a PCI Express flash card adapter with a very fast memory card. Guess this should bring best performance.
After first checks my Windows 7 installation boots in about 1:45 minutes (completely). Looks not so bad, since I’ve already installed software like Photoshop, Office, iTunes, etc. The real boot time of Windows 7 is slightly lower than BIOS start up also needs time, approx. 7 seconds.
Written on September 12, 2009 | Posted in
General
August 7th, 2009 Category: General
A very useful site for photographers comes from Rob Galbraith. A lot of CF/SD cards are measured with many different camera models regarding performance. Also several card readers are measured.
Also interesting for speed freak: the Pro Dual CompactFlash Adapter ExpressCard. The adapter allows to put 2 CF cards inside and offers very high performance.
If you want to have it really fast have a look!
Links
Written on August 7, 2009 | Posted in
General
January 11th, 2009 Category: PHP/MySQL
Optimizing a MySQL server is probably not very easy. It depends on your database structure, how many users are accessing your server and so on.
Basics
But there are a few things which could help to improve your performance. On my configuration I’ve added skip-name-resolve in my.cnf:
[mysqld]
skip-name-resolve
Now the MySQL server will not do any DNS name resolves. Please note that permissions based on hostnames will no longer work!
For security reasons I would also recommend binding only to the localhost address. Using this the MySQL server is not reachable on the Ethernet interface. In earlier version of MySQL this was usually done with the skip-networking parameter.
[mysqld]
bind-address = 127.0.0.1
And I’ve added skip-external-locking and skip-locking:
[mysqld]
skip-external-locking
skip-locking
This could also improve your performance.
Search Length
For text search queries with a allowed length of 2 characters add this line:
ft_min_word_len="2"
Otherwise default minimum length is 3 characters, which means that a search query “select * like ‘%AB%’” will never return any data.
Cache Settings
Caching seems to be a very important thing when optimizing your server. My feeling is that the standard configuration of a MySQL server is not really designed for machines with 1 GByte memory or above.
Below is my configuration, with a few cache settings increased.
[mysqld]
query_cache_limit = 1M
query_cache_size = 32M
thread_cache_size = 8
join_buffer = 1M
table_cache = 16M
sort_buffer_size = 2M
read_buffer_size = 2M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M
tmp_table_size = 48M
max_allowed_packet = 16M
thread_stack = 128K
key_buffer_size = 32M
This configuration works on a machine with 1 GByte RAM and several databases running. Basically I recommend to increase the cache size settings. And memory helps almost always.
Applies to MySQL version: 5.0.32
Written on January 11, 2009 | Posted in
PHP/MySQL
January 10th, 2009 Category: Linux
Another easy to use tool for measuring the network bandwidth is Iperf. On Debian it can be installed using:
apt-get install iperf
Optionally the source or the Windows binary is available from sourceforge.net/projects/iperf
Building and installing from source is done using a few commands:
tar xvfz iperf-2.0.4.tar.gz
cd iperf-2.0.4
./configure
make
make install
Once installed iperf the server is started on machine 1:
machine1:~# iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
Next the client is started on machine 2:
machine2:~# iperf -c machine1.mydomain.de
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to machine1.mydomain.de, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local xx.xx.xx.xx port 45325 connected with yy.yy.yy.yyport 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 96.6 MBytes 80.9 Mbits/sec
Tested on two servers connected with 100 MBit/s located at two different providers in Germany we get a result of 80.9 MBits/sec.
This result is slightly higher compared to the result from our measurement done with NETIO in the article Network Throughput Measurement. So we start the test again with addtional parameters:
machine2:~# iperf -c machine1.mydomain.de -w 512k -l 512k
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to machine1.mydomain.de, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 256 KByte (WARNING: requested 512 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local xx.xx.xx.xx port 40987 connected with yy.yy.yy.yyport 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 72.0 MBytes 60.3 Mbits/sec
Now using modified read/write buffer size and TCP windows size we get almost the same result as in our test with netio.
Definitely a tool which can be recommended to check your network throughput!
Written on January 10, 2009 | Posted in
Linux
January 10th, 2009 Category: Linux Server
A real nice and easy to use tool for measuring the network throughput on Linux/Unix as well as Windows is NETIO. You only need to download the binaries from the NETIO homepage, store on your server or clients and execute them.
The example below shows a sample measurement between to servers connected with a 100 MBit ethernet card and located at two different providers.
On one machine NETIO is started as server:
machine1:~/netio/bin# ./linux-i386 -s
NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26
(C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel
TCP server listening.
UDP server listening.
TCP connection established ...
Receiving from client, packet size 1k ...
Sending to client, packet size 1k ...
Receiving from client, packet size 2k ...
Sending to client, packet size 2k ...
Receiving from client, packet size 4k ...
Sending to client, packet size 4k ...
Receiving from client, packet size 8k ...
Sending to client, packet size 8k ...
Receiving from client, packet size 16k ...
Sending to client, packet size 16k ...
Receiving from client, packet size 32k ...
Sending to client, packet size 32k ...
Done.
TCP server listening.
On the other machine NETIO is called e.g. with -t option for TCP and the name or IP of the other machine:
machine2:~/netio/bin# ./linux-i386 -t machine1.mydomain.de
NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.26
(C) 1997-2005 Kai Uwe Rommel
TCP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 7309 KByte/s Tx, 7645 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 7276 KByte/s Tx, 7724 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 7291 KByte/s Tx, 7737 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 7276 KByte/s Tx, 7723 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 7286 KByte/s Tx, 7719 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 7291 KByte/s Tx, 7725 KByte/s Rx.
Done.
We take a rough average of the result can multiply it by 8: 7,5 * 8 = 60 MBit/s. This is a acceptable value for a connection between two servers located at different providers within Germany.
For sure a useful tool! Also check Network Bandwidth Performance Measurement with Iperf
Written on January 10, 2009 | Posted in
Linux Server
