Letsgetdugg

I recently learned a hard lesson with PostgreSQL’s long lived connections; persistent connections expand in memory size without giving any back to the OS. I saw our PostgreSQL database go from 1.2gigs (shared_buffers set to 1024m) to 3.8gigs in memory size. Almost 2.6gigs of memory wasted on persistent connections held on by our connection pool. […]

This is a followup on my previous post concerning how to correctly snapshot databases on ZFS. Snapshotting MySQL any other way will just lead to corrupt database states, essentially making your backups useless. Here is my script that I use to snapshot our MySQL database. It uses my zBackup.rb script for the automated backup rotation. […]

I have a very non-standard storage setup at home. The setup is made up of a 3x500G raidz array on ZFS hosted by OSX. For the longest time I could not get files to copy over samba on ZFS. The files would stream just fine but not copy over, they would abort at the 99% […]

CouchDB was made for next generation filesystems such as ZFS and BTRFS. First off, unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL, CouchDB can be snapshot while in production without any flushing or locking trickery since it uses an append only B-Tree storage approach. That alone makes it a compelling database choice on ZFS/BTRFS. Second, CouchDB works hand-in-hand with […]

I recently had a WD Raptor drive die in a server that hosted our PostgreSQL database. I had a ZFS snapshot strategy setup that sent over ZFS snapshots of the live database to a ZFS mirror for backup purposes. Looked good in theory right? Except, I forgot to do one critical thing, test my backups. […]

I needed something like zfs-auto-snapshot written by Tim Foster but portable so it works on all systems that support ZFS. I reviewed a few scripts on github and was unhappy with what was out there so I decided to write my own. With zbackup.rb you can define what to snapshot and how many rotation days […]

I hate expired sessions, death to all expired sessions. Traditionally a Java servlet container has a fixed session time, a flood of traffic can potentially cause JVM OOM errors if the session time is set too high. I wanted a smart session container that can hold onto sessions for as long as possible and expire […]

Update: I feel like a jackass now, I thought I was running this against the stable haproxy build, but in reality this was against haproxy-1.4dev6. DOH! Well on the bright-side, I am helping out the author fix a potentially critical bug. Here is the truss and tcp dump if anyone cares. Well yet another Solaris […]

I used to backup our database using the following statement; pg_dump -h fab2 -Fc -Z9 somedb > somedb.db Once our dataset grew into the gigabytes, it took a very long time to do database dumps. Today, I stumbled upon yet another awesome blog post done by Ted Dzibua mentioning two useful parallel compression utilities. So […]

I just pushed up a new version of Satan to GitHub. For the uniformed uninformed Satan is my process reaper for run away unix processes. Satan was designed to work with Solaris’ SMF self-healing properties. Basically, Satan kills while SMF revives. The new version that was pushed up contains HTTP health checks, so Satan now […]