Computing

TL;DR: Django ORM + psycopg2 adds ~50% overhead vs raw C/libpq for trivial single-row SELECTs. PgBouncer costs ~5%. Local connections are ~30% faster than network. The bottleneck is client-side — the database server barely breaks a sweat. I’ve been dealing with database performance issues in a fairly large Django application — neither the app servers nor the database show high CPU utilization, yet something is clearly bottlenecked. I put together some simple benchmarks to isolate where the overhead lives. ...

I know, it seems obvious… but when you’ve got one of those stupid print jobs stuck in the queue and they won’t go away… using the services manager to restart the print spooler apparently a pretty effective remedy in many cases. More later if I find out anything less lame.

So everybody knows by now that Oracle just jumped into the virtualization fray with their new Oracle VM product. If you’ve been under a rock, go to the oracle website to check it out. Given that I’m cheap and currently using VMWare’s free offering, I jumped at the chance to check out a supposedly ’enterprise ready’ Xen implementation for free. The 1/3 the overhead claim is just gravy! Anyway, as cool as Oracle Enterprise (Unbreakable?!) Linux may be, I’m running CentOS and am perfectly happy with it. Oracle VM wants a dedicated machine for the management station, which I can arrange for with a little tweaking. However, I build most of my machines up from ‘minimal’ installs. I read in the Oracle documentation that I would need libaio installed to make things go, which I did without any trouble. ...

Prescript: I wrote this over a month ago and still haven’t found an authoring plugin I like so it still looks terrible. See my next post and give me ideas or just call me lazy, thanks! Based on http://blog.scottlowe.org/2007/01/15/linux-ad-integration-version-4/ First, install windows 2003 R2 and install the identity management for unix option. Open control panel, select add remove programs, click add/remove windows components. It will grind a while and give you a list of possible services. You’ll need to expand ‘Active Directory Services’ and check the ‘Identify Management for Unix’ service. You will need to be in the schema admins group to do this. ...