Making Emacs Start Up Faster

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I use Emacs in terminals and start/close Emacs frequently as needed like in a file checking-editing-closing loop. However, Emacs seems take some time to start up especially some heavy modes are used. How to make Emacs start up faster? (If you just want the solution/script first, find the command in the summary section.) My solution
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Big Data Benchmark from AMPLab of UC Berkeley

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Benchmarks are important to understand the performance and quantitative and qualitative comparison of different systems. Many analytic frameworks, such as Hive, Impala and Shark, are designed and implemented these years and become fundamental software for processing big data. How to benchmark these big data analytic systems is an interesting problem. The Big Data Benchmark The
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SSH Port Forwarding on Linux

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Port forwarding (or tunnelling) is a method to forward one network traffic to another. We will introduce how to forward ports using SSH tunnel in this post. A simple example Let’s start with a simple and useful example: we want to forward local port 8080 to server:port. We can easily do this by using ssh
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Managing Xen Dom0′s CPU and Memory

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The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory
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How to Measure Time Accurately in Programs

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It is quite common to measure the time in programs using APIs like clock() and gettimeofday(). We may also want to measure the time “accurately” for certain purposes, such as measuring a small piece of code’s execution time for performance analysis, or measuring the time in time-sensitive game software. It is hard to measure the
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Favorite Sayings by John Ousterhout – Precious Experience and Advice for Building Systems

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John Ousterhout is a professor of Deparment of Computer Science from Stanford University. One recent project he is working on is the RAMCloud, a “new class of storage, based entirely in DRAM, that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than existing storage systems”. He posts his “Favorite Sayings” on his homepage. These sayings are precious
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CloudFlare with DreamHost

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CloudFlare is a very nice service that provides CDN / optimizer / security protection and more. Good news is that DreamHost turns to be a partner with CloudFlare. The free account on CloudFlare is enough for sites such as Fclose.com. I enabled CloudFlare yesterday and it works smoothly and boosts the site’s performance. Overall, I
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A Free Personal WordPress Blog Solution

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If you want to have a wordpress blog for FREE co.cc + x10hosting is the best choice. I will introduce both in this post. I will briefly introduce how to set up a wordpress blog like my blog. The overall that I paid for this blog is only $0.89. I can say that it is
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Installing Fedora 17 PV Domain-U on Xen with PXE Booting

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An introduction to the general method of installing Domain-U on Xen is introduced here: Setting Up Stable Xen DomU with Fedora: Unmodified Fedora 12 on top of Xenified Fedora 12 Dom0 with Xen (this is a general introduction, some details are changed, such as ‘xl’ replacing ‘xm’, LVM backing the disk for higher performance. But
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Setting Up VPN-like Network Between Several Clusters Using iptables

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It is common to connect servers with only internal IPs from several clusters. VPN is a common technique for this. With iptables, we can implement many functions of VPN with possibly higher performance. The slides here give a brief introduction to how to set up a VPN-like network between 2 clusters which connect to each
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Xen DomU’s I/O Performance of LVM and loopback Backed VBDs

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This posts list benchmark (using bonnie++) result of I/O performance of Xen LVM and loopback backed VBDs. The configuration of machines Dom0 VCPU: 2 (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520  @ 2.27GHz) Memory: 2GB Xen and Linux kernel: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified 2.6.32.13 kernel DomU VCPU: 2 Memory: 2GB Linux kernel: Fedora (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64) DomU’s profile: name=”10.0.1.200″ vcps=2
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Setting up Stable Xen Dom0 with Fedora: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified Linux Kernel 2.6.32.13 in Fedora 12

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This is the latest stable and recommended stable Xen Dom0 solution on Fedora 12. No serious bug found till now and we will fix the bugs by ourselves if some appears. It also works on Fedora 14 as well. It should not be hard to use this solution on other versions of Fedora or other
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Set up and Run Linux Xen Dom0 and DomU VMs

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The Xen solutions including installing and configuring Dom0 and DomU are summarized here. LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. LVM backed DomU is recommended.
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Setting Up Xen DomU on Fedora Linux (Fedora 12)

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Creating file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for Xen virtual machines and installing Fedora 12 in Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. Note that this tutorial is based on a pretty old OS (Fedora 12). But the method here is still valid while some minor details may need to be changed for latest Xen and
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An I/O Performance Comparison Between loopback Backed and blktap Backed Xen File-backed VBD

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I have done some I/O performance benchmark test of Xen DomU. For easier management, some of our DomU VMs are using file-backed VBDs. Previously, our VMs are using Loopback-mounted file-backed VBDs. But blktap-based support are recommended by Xen community. Before considering changing from loopback based VBD to blktap based VBD, I have done this performance
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A Simple CPU and Memory Performance Test of Xen Dom0 and DomU

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Please refer to Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora : Xen 3.4.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.29 on Fedora 12 for the platform of this test (this test runs on Fedora 11, however). I have done some simple performance test on DomU and Dom0 and compare with the performance on physical machines. These test are simple,
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Hadoop TeraSort Benchmark

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TeraSort is one of Hadoop’s widely used benchmarks. Hadoop’s distribution contains both the input generator and sorting implementations: the TeraGen generates the input and TeraSort conducts the sorting. Here, we provide a short tutorial for using the Hadoop TeraSort benchmark. TeraGen generates random data that can be used as input data for a subsequent running
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Conference Ranking by Average Number of Citations in the Last 5 Years, 2012

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I am trying to find out the top conferences that have the largest average number of citations in the last 5 years on the Internet but fail to find one. However, there are many rankings about the overall citations and numbers of publications. Hence, it is not hard to calculate the average number of citations
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Pitfalls and Lessons on Configuing and Tuning Hadoop

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This post lists pitfalls and lessons learning when configuring and tuning Hadoop. Hadoop with IPv6 Hadoo doesn’t support IPv6 currently (up to 0.20.2 and 0.21.0): Hadoop and IPv6. The performance of the cluster may suffer from turning IPv6 on in clusters: mail archive. One good practice is to disable IPv6 on servers in the Hadoop
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mrcc – A Distributed C Compiler System on MapReduce

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The mrcc project’s homepage is here: mrcc project. Abstract mrcc is an open source compilation system that uses MapReduce to distribute C code compilation across the servers of the cloud computing platform. mrcc is built to use Hadoop by default, but it is easy to port it to other could computing platforms, such as MRlite,
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