Tag: analysis

“Always Measure one Level Deeper” – Advice on Performance Measurements

Recently I stumbled on a nice piece called “Always Measure One Level Deeper” by John Ousterhout, from Communications of the ACM, July 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/7/229031-always-measure-one-level-deeper/fulltext. The article is about performance analysis, and how important it is to not just look at the top-level numbers and easy-to-see aspects of a system, but to also go (at least) one level deeper to measure the components and subsystems that affect the overall system performance.

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Intel Blog: Using CoFluent to Model and Simulate Big Data Systems

Cofluent studio Intel CoFluent Technology is a simulation and modeling tool that can be used for a wide variety of different systems and different levels of scale – from the micro-architecture of a hardware accelerator, all the way up to clustered networked big data systems. On the Intel Evangelist blog on the Intel Developer Zone, I have a write-up on how CoFluent is being used to do model just that: Big Data systems. I found the topic rather fascinating, how you can actually make good predictions for systems at that scale – without delving into details. At some point, I guess systems become big enough that you can start to make accurate predictions thanks to how things kind of smooth out when they become large enough.

Off-Topic: Analyzing Outlook Mailbox Size

Where I work, we use Exchange as our email server and Outlook as the primary client (at least I do). We also have an email quota that I keep bumping into, since I have a tendency to attract many emails with large attachments like image-happy PowerPoint files or binary code modules to patch things. I am also an extreme user of email folders. My main Outlook account contains some 650 folders, and my offline archive of all my old emails reaches towards 1300, with many 100s of thousands of emails for a total of almost 20 GB. So, pretty extreme.

My problem is: what do I do when the email system tells me (and it is serious, I can attest) that I am close to hitting my quota and that soon email will neither be received nor sent? I want to find the folders that are very large and candidates for some archiving. The answer has eluded me for a long time, until I stumbled upon a 2010 Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3skJOd4GIak, from “tech-informer.com” (which now looks pretty dead). With some modifications, this solved my problem.

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