H. Mijail's Blog

This is about a shocking realization I got while learning about the LMAX Disruptor – a data structure / architecture that got published in 2011 and made some waves across the web because it allowed LMAX to process +6M transactions per second on a single thread. In Java. Which was interesting because Java was (still?) supposed to be too slow for that kind of thing. By then I was already a couple of years out of the Java world and getting into embedded C, so I took a mental note to look into it just out of curiosity. But, as could be expected, the note was promptly forgotten. I'm now looking again into Java, so finally I managed to take a peek at the Disruptor. Shock: this is just a description of what I was implementing in C while I was still learning it! But it's not that I'm a genius; it's that this is probably the only way to do things when in a limited environment. In fact, the basic architecture is the one used typically in drivers and in Linux's NAPI networ

I found that the WiFi on my MacBook Pro (late-2013) works slowly on 5 GHz / 80 MHz channels (topping out at about 30 Mbps). Enough so that it's at least 3x faster when connected to the 2.4 GHz band in the same router (and I say at least because I can't measure any higher). So, if your router works in the 2 bands and your Mac is switching between them transparently (as it usually does, which usually is advantageous), then you would be seeing big, mysterious changes in speed.

After a couple of months using CrashPlan I wrote about its awkward feature set and their interactions . The awkwardness didn't negate that it seemed to work well enough, better than the alternatives I tried at the moment. Still, it was also bad enough that it motivated me to keep my TimeMachine local backup, even though my earlier idea was to get rid of it. 8 months later, I'm fed up enough with CrashPlan to start looking for alternatives. This is a list of my problems with it, which are the things I would have liked to realize earlier. All of these complaints have been brought up with their Support, even explicitly as feature requests and/or bug reports, and the eventual answers have not been particularly helpful nor encouraging; in the best cases Support just provided workarounds to suspend the pain for a while.