Hacker News: olavgg

New comment by olavgg in "Redis 8.8: New array data structure, rate limiter, performance improvements"

olavgg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:16:46 +0000

We're a self hosted shop, we went with Valkey. Valkey also has support for RDMA, which we already is running in our infrastructure.

New comment by olavgg in "Redis 8.8: New array data structure, rate limiter, performance improvements"

olavgg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:14:11 +0000

But that is his point. If you cannot find the session id in redis, you login again. If your Redis server crash, you start a new one and everyone just login again. No data is lost.

New comment by olavgg in "Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux"

olavgg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:19:23 +0000

When I look at the oil & gas sector, I remember MS-DOS + Wordperfect was the beginning. Then Windows 3.1 + Microsoft Office took over, and since that, its been Microsoft, Azure, and SAP.

They refuse Google Cloud, AWS, and many still believe open-source is cancer. They are Microsofts best customers. They prefer consultants over hiring software developers, and the consultants just to what they're told and never question the status quo.

Whenever I spending time at these companies, my head is filled with dinosaurs.

Where I live we have something called The ONS event/Exhibition, where the oil sector gathers to promote themself. 2 years ago AWS had a big stand there, but it was mostly empty. This year, AWS doesn't participate at all.

New comment by olavgg in "The real cost of owning a home"

olavgg — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:54:13 +0000

I just paid 120 000 USD for replacing the exterior drainage system. I knew it was expensive, but not that expensive.

New comment by olavgg in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

olavgg — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:48:49 +0000

Every time I give Photoshop a chance I give completely up, the thing doesn't even start on neither Fedora or Ubuntu and I have no interest in configuring Wine for this. GIMP is the least painful way to get the job done. I have been using it for over 20 years, and it has been a pain-free experience. That GIMP is bad is just as wrong as the people who say Java is bad.

But you know what's even worse, people that use Illustrator to create SVG's for the web. Inkscape creates proper readable SVG's at 5KB, compared to 50MB SVG's I get from Illustrator experts.

New comment by olavgg in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

olavgg — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:45:27 +0000

It is a bit different, Mellanox with iSCSI/iSER over IB/RoCE is much less complex than iSCSI over TCP. RoCE runs over UDP, but requires switches with PFC, and ECN. Chelsio plays nice with any switch. Mellanox has much better offloading of NVMe-oF, where the network card can directly communicate with the NVMe device over pci-express so it can completely bypass system ram and host cpu. In fact, Linux will know nothing about the transfers to and from the NVMe device.

To get accelerated iSCSI, you need to install Chelsio or Mellanox drivers. While both work out of the box with the inbox drivers, they have special drivers that you have to download and install to unlock the extra performance. I think Chelsio has everything included in FreeBSD, so there the inbox drivers already come with top performance unlocked.

New comment by olavgg in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

olavgg — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:54:26 +0000

ZFS supports self healing, you do not have scrub, it will be corrected during a bad read as long you have a copy. Metadata has 2 copies by default for additional safety for a single disk.

New comment by olavgg in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

olavgg — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:19:05 +0000

Using a proper NIC (Chelsio) with their iSCSI accelerator will boost your iSCSI performance significantly. Another alternative is Mellanox with RDMA. You need CX4+ for optimal performance over TCP/IP, while the cheap CX3 is excellent with IPoIB. If you have a lot of packet drops and retransmissions, another option for boosting iSCSI performance is getting a network switch with a lot of memory for packet buffering. This helps with incast congestion. There are special switches with gigabytes of memory built for this.

NVMe-oF is the best protocol with least overhead for network drives, with a proper setup you lose only 10-20% latency compared to local disk even with Intel Optane. Throughput should be almost similar.

New comment by olavgg in "245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping"

olavgg — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:54:02 +0000

A 42U rack filled with 1u servers with 8 drives each, will have 84PB of data. It feels like it was a few month ago where you could buy a rack with 1PB of storage, and that was awesome. Not anymore.

New comment by olavgg in "Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails"

olavgg — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:57:03 +0000

I would not worry about running a distro. Most things are similar, there are some minor differences between the GNU applications and the FreeBSD alternatives. But for most people there is nothing to worry about. Most applications runs fine on BSD. Bind, PowerDNS, Java Applications, PostgreSQL, Python, rsync and many more. Getting PyTorch to work with Nvidia and Cuda is most likely another story.

My main culprit with FreeBSD is that upgrading the kernel is not a simple dnf update command. But its still easier than upgrading RHEL from 9 to 10.

New comment by olavgg in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

olavgg — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:15:49 +0000

I just started with FreeCAD this weekend, and in 3 hours I managed to create a simple pci bracket that I could 3dprint. I just followed some YouTube tutorials. When I learned 3D Studio Max 25 years ago, I struggled a lot more.

New comment by olavgg in "Migrating to the EU"

olavgg — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:45:38 +0000

Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.

New comment by olavgg in "What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)"

olavgg — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:07:05 +0000

You are correct that writes are not guaranteed to be atomic. PostgreSQL has a feature to handle torn pages: full_page_writes = on, which is enabled by default. This means you do double write.

For RocksDB I believe torn pages are not a problem as SST files are immutable. But correct me if I am wrong.

New comment by olavgg in "What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)"

olavgg — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:40:38 +0000

I have tried multiple enterprise SSD's, for sync writes. Nothing comes close to Optane Dimm, even Optane NVMe is 10x slower than PDIMMS.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/so-i-teste...

New comment by olavgg in "WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026"

olavgg — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:23:04 +0000

It is my text, enchanced by AI. Without AI, I would never have used the word "Monopsony". So I learned something new writing this comment.

New comment by olavgg in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

olavgg — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:02:54 +0000

Its not only about performance, Redis data structures offer an even more advanced caching and data processing. I even use Redis as a cache for ClickHouse.

New comment by olavgg in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

olavgg — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:54:46 +0000

On average I get around 4x compression on PostgreSQL data with zstd-1

New comment by olavgg in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

olavgg — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:41:45 +0000

> I would rather pay a competent cloud provider than being responsible for reliability issues.

Why do so many developers and sysadmins think they're not competent for hosting services. It is a lot easier than you think, and its also fun to solve technical issues you may have.

New comment by olavgg in "FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)"

olavgg — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:29:40 +0000

The biggest advantage of ZFS from a operational experience, is that when you have problems, ZFS tells you why. Checksum errors? Something wrong with the hard drive or SATA/SAS cables. Is the disk slow, zfs events will tell you that it spent more than 5 seconds to read sector x from disk /dev/sdf. The zfs cli commands are super-intuitive, and makes fully sense. Compared to ie. virsh, which is just weird for managing vm's.

It definitely worth the hassle. But if everything works fine for you now, don't bother. ZFS is not going away and you can learn it later.

New comment by olavgg in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

olavgg — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:30:15 +0000

ZFS snapshot, send, receive, clone, spin up another postgresql server on the backup server, take full backup on that clone once per week