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mgerdts commented on Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs   marginalia.nu/log/a_123_i... · Posted by u/ingve
mgerdts · 9 days ago
> Modern enterprise NVMe SSDs are very fast…. This is a simple benchmark on a Samsung PM9A1 on a with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3.5 GB/s. … It should be noted that this is a sub-optimal setup that is less powerful than what the PM9A1 is capable of due to running on a downgraded PCIe link.

Samsung has client, datacenter, and enterprise lines. The PM9A1 is part of the OEM client segment and is about the same as a 980 Pro. Its top speeds (about 7GB/s read, 5GB/s write) are better than the comparable datacenter class drive, PM9A3. This top speeds comes with less consistent performance than you get with a PM9A3 or an enterprise drive like a PM1733 from the same era (early PCIe Gen 4 drives).

mgerdts commented on Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death   energyvanguard.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/almuhalil
Arainach · a month ago
These don't work because suburbs are a ponzi scheme that is collapsing.

People are grudgingly willing to pay to put in a brand new sewer once. No one wants to fund maintenance or pay millions to replace it in 60 years and cities are literally going bankrupt because the population density isn't enough to maintain the infrastructure.

Cities realized this decades ago which is why many are reluctant to add more unsustainable public roads/sewers/etc. and insist new development owns and funds them privately....which tends to require a HOA to fund maintenance from communal contributions/reserves.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-h...

mgerdts · a month ago
My back yard neighbors live on a private street with an HOA. When the city water pressure went high for a brief period of time, they were one of the few places to have water lines burst. Their private supply lines were not of the same rating as the city lines that supply similar neighborhoods. Since this was private, this HOA was on the hook for ripping up the street, repairing water lines, and fixing their street. Being a customer that doesn’t normally need such services, the fix was done a couple months after the water lines break. They had a week or so with no water and many weeks of water being fed to their homes via hoses connecting a fire hydrant and the spigots they would normally use to get water outside.

They were so lucky this happened in the summer. In the winter, the hoses would have frozen solid.

These folks were very sad the city’s water utility couldn’t do the work. They fix water main breaks within a couple days, usually the same day.

mgerdts commented on Someone made a 128k line PR to OpenCut   github.com/OpenCut-app/Op... · Posted by u/agtestdvn
mgerdts · a month ago
Coderabbit’s estimate of review time is interesting:

Estimated code review effort

5 (Critical) | ~90 minutes

mgerdts commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout   thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve
johnklos · a month ago
It makes sense, if one considers them the evolution of the Apple II and the IBM PC.

The IBM had the motherboard on the left, along with the expansion cards, and the drives and power supply on the right. The AT continued this.

Clones wanted mostly compatible cases, and motherboards wanted to be mostly compatible with IBM cases and clone cases.

Then we had Amigas like the Amiga 3000, which had a similar layout but a riser to take horizontal expansion cards.

While some more bespoke PCs had vertical risers, most PC cases in the early to mid '90s were large. It was the machines we paid a bit more for that made being smaller in to something a bit premium.

While taking apart my Amiga 3000 is a bit of work, the design is absolutely wonderful, and more than once I thought about the design of it compared with later machines like the Sun Ultra 5, the Motorola StarMax (PowerPC Mac clone) and others.

mgerdts · a month ago
> like the Sun Ultra 5

The Ultra 5 (desktop) and Ultra 10 (tower) were a cost cutting exercise that put an UltraSPARC IIi (2i) onto what I think was an ATX form factor motherboard. It used ATA drives, USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA port, etc. This was an act of desperation from Sun, not an example of their best engineering.

That said, compared the performance of a $3500 Ultra 10 with 512 MiB of RAM to $10k+ Sun Ultra 30’s and HP C180’s, each with 128 MiB of RAM. These prices were after applying significant edu discounts. The heftier sheet metal, SCSI drives, and nostalgia did not allow these traditional UNIX workstations to touch the performance of the much cheaper Ultra 10 with 4x the RAM.

mgerdts commented on Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel (2022)   erisa.dev/exposing-a-web-... · Posted by u/sturza
mgerdts · a month ago
The missing part of this recipe is to make it so that when your internet exposed app gets compromised the attacker doesn’t have easy access to your home network.
mgerdts commented on Trans-Taiga Road (2004)   jamesbayroad.com/ttr/inde... · Posted by u/jason_pomerleau
jedberg · 2 months ago
Intersting! I know that in the contiguous USA, you will never be more than 20 miles from a road no matter where you are, but have no idea how far one can drive from a town.
mgerdts · 2 months ago
This story is about a road in Canada. I doubt the 20 mile thing holds in remote parts of Alaska.
mgerdts commented on NovaCustom – Framework Laptop alternative focusing on privacy   novacustom.com/... · Posted by u/CHEF-KOCH
mgerdts · 2 months ago
I’m confused how a premium priced laptop comes with an NVMe drive that uses host memory buffer (HMB) rather than having sufficient RAM on the drive. At Amazon, a better drive like a WD SN850x costs 25% less than the GOODRAM drive they include.
mgerdts commented on I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui   jdiaz97.github.io/greenbl... · Posted by u/jdiaz97
dark__paladin · 2 months ago
I'm not a UI dev but I have messed with Qt some. Does egui or some other rust framework the same native look that Qt does?
mgerdts · 2 months ago
From https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#non-goals

Non-goals

* Become the most powerful GUI library

* Native looking interface

mgerdts commented on Cray versus Raspberry Pi   aardvark.co.nz/daily/2025... · Posted by u/flyingkiwi44
Mountain_Skies · 2 months ago
Not really. My 1983 Datsun would talk, but it couldn't converse. Alexa and Siri couldn't hold a conversation anywhere near the level KITT did. There's a big difference. With LLMs, we're getting close.
mgerdts · 2 months ago
mgerdts commented on Microsandbox: Virtual Machines that feel and perform like containers   github.com/microsandbox/m... · Posted by u/makeboss
dataflow · 3 months ago
VirtualBox on Windows, primarily. Though I feel like haven't seen other VMs in the past start up a whole ton faster (maybe a somewhat) (ignoring WSL2). Page files are already disabled, there's plenty of free RAM, and it makes no difference how little RAM the guest is allocated (even if it's 256MB). So no, those are not the issues. VirtualBox itself seems to be doing something slow during that time and I don't know what that is.
mgerdts · 3 months ago
What is your definition of free memory? If the system has read a lot of data, the page cache is probably occupying most of the RAM you consider free. Look at cache and standby counters.

I’ve noticed that windows can only evict data from the page cache at about 5 GB/s. I do not know if this zeros the memory or that would need to be done in the allocation path.

A couple years ago I tracked down a long pause while starting qemu on Linux to it zeroing the 100s of GB of RAM given to the VM as 1 GB huge pages.

These may or may not be big contributors to what you are seeing, depending on the VM’s RAM size.

u/mgerdts

KarmaCake day1385August 20, 2016
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Software engineer specializing in operating systems and the backend layers closest to the OS. Previously a sysadmin.
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