The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The end result was a computer producing vast amounts of nothing very slowly

So, I run this loadtest program on my work computer. It's going, I can see the components I'm testing registering events (via the realtime viewer I wrote for syslogintr). Everything is going fine … and … … then … … … t … h … e … … c … o … m … p … … u … … … t … … … … e … … … … … r … … … … … … … … s … … … … … … … … … … l … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … o … … … … … … … … … … … … w … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … s …

It takes about ten minutes to type and run, but this:

[spc]saltmine:~>uptime
 14:44:20 up 6 days, 23:12, 10 users,  load average: 2320.45, 1277.98, 546.61

was quite amusing to see (usually the load average is 0). Perhaps it was just a tad ambitious to simulate 10,000 units on the work computer (each unit its own thread, running a Lua script—yes, even after the modifications to the Lua interpreter).

Also amusing was this:

[spc]saltmine:~>free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3910888     640868    3270020          0      35568     185848
-/+ buffers/cache:     419452    3491436
Swap:     11457532     544260   10913272

Yes, eleven gigabytes of memory were shoved out to the disk, so most of the slowless was due to thrashing.

Perhaps I should find some fellow cow-orker's computer to run this on …

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