Microservices, Monitoring, Infrastructure as Code & Test Automation

I always liked the name Julia but now we have a nice new parallel programming language with that very name.

The Julia Programming language is a parallel computing model that works across multiple cores and cluster nodes.

To read more
http://julialang.org/

Just recently I needed to perform some load / stress testing on a web application hosted on the east coast of america.

I had a number of dedicated test boxes around Ireland and the UK

but I was concerned that the geographic distance may be playing a part in the results I was seeing

So I needed to get a server in the US from which I could launch similar tests.

M-Net is a public-access UNIX system based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, owned by Arbornet

You can telnet in to m-net.arbornet.org, login with newuser, no password, and it will allow you setup a username with password on a free bsd shell

Great idea. It allowed me perform performance tests on my web app on the east coast from mid western US.

Installing sysstat on Ubuntu

1. Install
apt-get install sysstat

2. Enable collection of system performance data
vi /etc/default/sysstat
set “ENABLED” to “true”.

3. Start the sysstat service
/etc/init.d/sysstat start

4. Take a look at performance data every 10 minutes.
sar

If you'd like to change the interval (every 10 minutes) by which sysstat collects data.  You can change the interval by editing /etc/cron.d/sysstat
PATH=/usr/lib/sysstat:/usr/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
# Activity reports every 10 minutes everyday 5-55/10 * * * * root command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1
# Activity reports every 5 minutes everyday 5-55/5 * * * * root command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1