Slow on Evan Hoffman

Slow HTTP downloads through Cisco ASA 5500

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:15:20 +0000

Recently we noticed weird behavior downloading files from certain sites. The transfer would start out fast (around 10 MB/s), then after a couple of seconds it would plummet to around 9 KB/s. It didn’t happen for every file or every site: downloads from S3 buckets were still particularly fast. But some files that I remember being particularly fast were now showing this weird fast/slow/fast/slow behavior, for example the Sun JDK and ISOs from rit.edu that used to saturate our pipe were now getting all cRAzY.

Macbook Pro locks up with SSD installed.

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:04:54 +0000

A few weeks ago I switched from my trusty old HP nc8430 to a Macbook Pro (MC118LL/A) that was left spare when another employee left. I mostly enjoyed using Linux but I was tired of dealing with weird quirks like having X lock up, essentially forcing me to do a hard reboot.

To transition, I copied my documents from Linux to Mac, then turned off the Linux laptop. Surprisingly I found I didn’t need to turn Linux back on at all. Last week, I decided to put the final nail in Linux’s coffin by taking the SSD (Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG2D)out of it and putting it in my Macbook. The Macbook was pretty fast (Core 2 Duo @ 2.5 GHz) but some things were noticeably slower on its 7200RPM disk than on Linux with an SSD, especially running Windows VMs.

Amazon EC2 - ext3 mkfs takes 30+ minutes?

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:33:42 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Amazon EC2 for a new project I’m working on and so far I’m really impressed. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that it takes forever to create an ext3 filesystem on a new volume. For example, the below command took over 30 minutes to create the filesystem on a 300 GB volume:

mke2fs -j -m0 /dev/sdf1

mke2fs 1.40.4 (31-Dec-2007) Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) 39321600 inodes, 78642183 blocks 0 blocks (0.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0 Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296 2400 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 16384 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616