Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. In this article we have our Btrfs test results when the zlib compression mount option was enabled for looking at the SSD compression performance.

An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google's Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster.

Last week GCC 4.5.0 entered the world with improvements. Over the weekend we decided to benchmark this major update to the GNU Compiler Collection to see how its performance compares to that of GCC 4.3 and 4.4.

Phoronix has used its Test Suite to compare the memory and power consumption of different desktop environments. However, the results should be handled with care.

In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article.

I want to write about Cassandra performance tuning, but first I need to cover some basics: how to use vmstat, iostat, and top to understand what part of your system is the bottleneck -- not just for Cassandra but for any system.

It is often a question of debate. Are packages compiled from source really faster than pre-digested ones? In other words will your Linux distribution run faster with apt or rpm packages compared to having everything compiled from source on your machine?

Tomorrow will mark the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, and while there is still a long journey ahead for this Long-Term Support release before it officially makes its debut in April, we could not pass up the opportunity to provide some early benchmarks.