Sunday, January 27, 2008

Sun T series servers

We've been measuring how our server software performs on Sun T series servers against the older V series.

The results with the T series have been very encouraging. For comparable servers the T series performance is around double the throughput of the V series. We're very pleased with this. This is good news because comparable T series cost less than V series and power consumption is lower. With Sun SPARC binary compatibility all the applications still run the same.

I'm very impressed with the T series. One component of our application runs on Tomcat. I wasn't sure how a busy Tomcat would run on a T1000 with a load test. It ran really well. I guess the JVM threading implementation does a good job of utilizing the T series multicore architecture.

The Sun T series is a very interesting architecture. Just one physical CPU with a clock speed in the modest range of 1-1.2 Ghz. The multicore architecture with many CPUs and independent execution threads on the single chip is remarkable.

You can now try out some advanced Sun technology like the T series servers for a free trial using Sun try and buy program.

I've worked with Sun hardware and over the last decade and I've always been a fan. I hope Sun and Solaris can continue to innovate prosper and stay around.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Private domain name registration

I bought a domain name from Yahoo domains recently. It was for a site I was helping my son set up. It's a basic setup. It just uses Blogger to post content. It's working out OK so far.

I didn't realize that you can just buy a domain name from within Blogger now so knowing that I might have done things differently. Still Yahoo domains has a good user interface and it was interesting and not difficult to get it all set up.

One thing that was interesting about domains that I noticed from Yahoo and other providers I checked out like GoDaddy is this private registration option. When you register a domain you have to provide whois information about the domain owner. The whois information includes address, phone number, and e-mail. Registrars like Yahoo warn you that this is public information and spammers and other undesirables will be able to find you when it is posted.

The registrars have a service called private domain information. In this case they offer to substitute their own information in the whois so that you do not have to provide your own personal data. This is an extra cost service. For Yahoo private registration costs almost as much as the domain name itself so it's not really cheap.

I decided not to purchase private registration. First of all I realized that my personal information is public anyway. My phone number is listed and I can be looked up in canada411.ca and elsewhere easily enough. So there's nothing in the whois which isn't already knowable.

The other reason I didn't purchase it is because it is unnecessary. With Yahoo the whois stuff is just a form you fill in. It seems you can enter whatever you want into this form and just manually obscure your identity that way. There doesn't seem to be anything preventing this.

So my tip is to save your money on domain registration and pass on the private registration option since you can just directly type in whatever you want anyway for the whois so you don't need to purchase separate private registration.