Re: [noaaport] [ldm-users] latency improvement

• To: ldm-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Re: [noaaport] [ldm-users] latency improvement
• From: Gilbert Sebenste <sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:33:57 -0600 (CST)

On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, patrick wrote:

I was futzing about with a home linux box and
noticed some small improvement in performance
after a bios upgrade, and was curious if a similar
upgrade would improve the performance of
my noaaport relays.

The chart below is cropped from our unidata charts
showing the change in latency on one of the relays,
before and after the bios upgrade... rough guess
maybe 20-25% improvement.

[IMAGE]

If any of you use dell servers I've stumbled across
a simpler way to upgrade bios that works just
fine, even remotely.

I've made a post on my blog here that outlines
the process:

http://www.bandiedmain.com/

I have several servers from SW Technology with ASUS
motherboards. On one of my servers, weather2,
I had issues whenever there was significant load on it.
The OS would crash, and the hard drive would eventually
croak! Then I discovered nearly 3 years of BIOS updates...20
of them, fixing literally hundreds of problems.
Most of them were small, but some were big, including the
issues I was experiencing. After flashing the BIOS, I have
yet to have one issue with it.

I don't know if it will increase throughput, but I recommend
doing it *--very-- carefully* if your BIOS is older and IF it
has significant fixes for you. But as I said, be very careful:
do it wrong, get a power interruption during it, and you
can kiss your motherboard goodbye forever. That happened to
me a few years ago, when a flash on an HP server went awry and
the actual software that performed it crashed. I couldn't
recover from it. The motherboard was proven faulty anyway,
and thankfully, it was under warranty (since it was brand new).

Gilbert

*******************************************************************************
Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                                  ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
*******************************************************************************

• References:
  • [noaaport] latency improvement
    • From: patrick