Kafka overview

Zookeeper General definition of distributed system: a software system that is composed of independent computing entities linked together by a computer network whose components communicate and coordinate with each other to achieve a common computational goal. Implementing coordination among components of a distributed system is hard. For example, designated master node becomes single point of … Read moreKafka overview

How NFS works

I touched on NFS in several previous postings, and here is a deeper dive of this particular protocol. NFS is built on top of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and therefore it is important to understand RPC first. In fact NFS is one of the most prominent user of RPC and the best example for learning … Read moreHow NFS works

Performance Analysis

Overview In 2015, Brendan Gregg posted two great articles on Netflix blog: Linux Performance Analysis in 60 seconds, and Linux Perfomrance Tools. They have great value when I was in a urgency to spot performance issues. The articles cover the essential tools for performance troubleshooting, including: We will dive into each of them in the … Read morePerformance Analysis

Setup WSL2 (and Docker) on Windows 10

This is not for Linux snobs, but rather for those who are stuck with a Windows work laptop, have to deal with Linux on a daily basis, and are not a fan of PuTTY. This posting provides the steps to setup Windows 10 so you get a work environment closer to a Linux one. The … Read moreSetup WSL2 (and Docker) on Windows 10

Balloon steals memory from virtual machines

This article is my experience with memory balloon on virtual machine. I came across an ElasticSearch server (ESXi guest with 32GB physical memory) where the main process keeps dying of OOM. Even worse, after the OOM event, the free memory left is about 10G and Elastic Search cannot start because its JVM is set with … Read moreBalloon steals memory from virtual machines

How memory usage adds up in Linux

There are too many metrics that describes some aspects about memory in Linux. Further to an old article on this site, where several concepts were discussed, this posting will make sense of those common metrics in Linux, CentOS as an example. The most fundamental command is free and my favourite switch is -h for human … Read moreHow memory usage adds up in Linux