[Mastering-perl] Benchmarking - first commands

[Bill Ricker]

What sorts of feedback do you want this early in the writing process?

I'm breaking my own rules about plain text email ... will this work?

I'll assume you do NOT want to hear about pod2html error messages this early
(you can see those yourself with podcheck) nor  spots where pod2html wrapped
what should be non-wrapped [e.g., stats block starting at "
albook_brian[519]$" that isn't indented in pod], and that we should stick to
"content", unless told otherwise. (O'Reilly has paid professionals to worry
about formatting and fluffy grammer bits.)

In general, I like your writing style so far. A couple quibbles from my
peculiar corporate view. I'll have to tear into the code another night ...

"Benchmarking isn't as popular ..." --  We don't get hardware upgrades on
the big iron as easily as before dot.bomb, so benchmarking and other
optimization techniques are getting popular again. Linux boxes may be
disposable, but big Unix servers aren't. Granted, the shell script consuming
25% of a $50k server that I just helped optimize didn't need benchmarking to
get the first order of magnitude fixes (use perl: replace while-grep
process-rabbit with single perl command).

"Idle CPUs are Wasted CPUs" ---  There is a tension in Corporate IT culture.
While we don't like to over-buy CPUs -- which is why benchmarking could make
a comeback -- we don't like to buy only-just-enough on the big-iron either.
On a build server, yes, should be running a build or a test all the time.
However, on Production servers, we like to have some head room for a bad day
at the office, and a bit more head room for future growth, as data seems to
accumulate like compound interest. And then there's  failover/disaster
capacity. Maybe with linux scaleout clusters, Grid computing, or other
virtualization I can farm out my dark capacity instead of replicating it ...

--
Bill
n1vux at arrl.net bill.n1vux at gmail.com
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