Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

Recently, I rediscovered atop. It is an excellent command-line tool (just like top) that shows some advanced statistics including disk usage and swap page faults per process. For the disk usage to work per process a kernel patch is currently required. However, even without the kernel patch if you know which processes running on your server you’ll be able to guess which is utilizing the disk more.

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Since I updated the website this weekend and it’s been downloading images from MRIS non-stop. In a previous post I said that I had around 900,000 images. I later on discovered that I had dangling images whose listings were deleted. Since this weekend, the update script downloaded almost 820,000 images from MRIS and inserted those binaries inside bytea fields in postgresql. I was expecting things to slow down, however I don’t feel any slow down since the process started. It seems the postgres team really optimized the b-tree indexes to the extreme.

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