Well anyway, here’s a tip for everyone who hasn’t made the jump to solid state: try to be nice to your disk drive. Brendan Gregg from Sun’s Fishworks team wanted to see the effects of vibrations on his disk array, so he proceeded to shout at it. On video. Yeah, we bet that’s pretty embarrassing for the drive in question, and what results is a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Moral of the story? Yelling at your computer isn’t going to make it run any faster. How about next time we see how it reacts to Ozzy, Mozart and warm, gentle nuzzles?

[Via Slashdot]

Sun held an event dedicated to scaling for startups. As scaling is something very interesting for Flosoft.biz, I popped into London and joined the event. A huge white building. A gigantic reception with one guy sitting behind it. Sun was the door on the left.

Inside I met up with Artur from Tigase who also joined the event. The evening then started off with a few talks from Last.fm and Sun. Here’s the Agenda of the evening.

18:00: Registration/Networking
18:30: Last FM
Why you should scale and lessons learnt
Mike Brodbelt
18:45: Sun Microsystems,
OpenSolaris- ZFS, Dtrace: Scaling and more scaling the easy way
Phil Harman
19:15: Break
19:30: Proven Scaling: MySQL
Optimise and Scale, now for the future
Mike Griffiths
20:00: Fav.or.it
Why I thought about scaling from day 1
Nick Halstead
20:15: Q&A Roundtable
20:30: Beer and pizza

I just love these events. There’s nothing wrong with Beer and Pizza. It’s a pity that the Pizza was gone quite quickly, about 3 slices a person, but I think that it wasn’t meant to substitute dinner. At this point, I would like to quote Alex: “The only thing that doesn’t scale well, was the Pizza”.

From this event I’ve learnt quite a bit about ZFS and Solaris, and will definetly play around with it the next few days. Also the MySQL scaling parts we’re interesting.

All in one, an interesting night.