On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
A further problem is that if nobody reports these issues properly, they won't get fixed.
The best thing to do is to report bugs that can be easily reproduced. Reporting something that happens on your production network is not easy to reproduce. A bug report that starts with "get a server with 4*SATA disks and 100 copies of the 3.0.0 kernel source tree on an Ext4 filesystem on software RAID-5" is something that can be reproduced without excessive effort. If your employer is serious about server performance then they should buy you a bunch of systems for testing such things. Getting some commodity servers to reproduce the bug is a good thing as it increases the chance that someone with the required skill and interest will have access to the hardware. Also it's not THAT hard to have an auto-build configuration with PXE and setting up some servers with ssh access isn't THAT hard either. If you put a pair of servers online that are identical apart from kernel version and invited any interested person to login and find out why the performance was different then it would get some interest. For any organisation that has millions of files on a web server they should be able to afford a couple of white-box systems for such testing. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/