EXT3 vs EXT4 vs XFS vs BTRFS - filesystems comparison on Linux kernel 3.0.0

I'm sure that I don't need to introduce you Joomla: this powerful, (more or less) user friendly CMS (content management system) is well known and widely used nowadays. It assists the user in quickly publishing its articles and news stories, while relieving him from some of the needed in-depth HTML and CSS knowledge. This sort of CMSs were, and are, a key factor for the “Web 2.0” revolution (whatever this term means for you!)

However, this great, added flexibility come with a cost: performance. Joomla and other free CMSs heavily use object-oriented PHP scripts, leading to quite high load on the hosting server. The net result is that while a cheap server machine can sustain thousands statics HTML pages and many hundreds “light” dynamic pages, the very same machine can find itself in troubles trying to provide more than few Joomla's pages.

Some days ago, while reading a tech-related forum, I stumble into a little flame-war about the usefulness of (or lack of) Intel's hyperthreading technology and on why AMD decided to not implement it into its latest processor design, aka Bulldozer. Intel's fans stated that hyperthreading give a quite big performance boost for very small die area, while AMD's ones praised the (alleged) superiority of AMD dual-core module approach.

Over four years has passed since the debut of the first product powered by ATI's then-new R600 design, the Radeon 2900XT. This graphic card was generally unable to compete, both performance- wise and in power consumption, with nVidia's 8800GTX, powered by the formidable nVidia's G80 chip.

On the other hand, while the 2900XT is remembered more for its problems (power consumption and not-over-the-top performance) than for its features, the chip's design proved to be a capable one: it scaled very well on RV770, RV870 and (with some major modifications) on Cayman ASICs.

Today, I am going to review an interesting, small Mikrotik firewall: the RouterBOARD 750 GL, or RB750GL for friends. This little appliance, albeit low-cost, pack a quite high number of features thanks to the use of RouterOS (a Linux-based OS) version 5. Here you can read the full product specifications: http://routerboard.com/RB750GL

In short, we are dealing with a 400 MHz MIPS-based appliance that boost 5 Gigabit Ethernet port and support for some advanced stuff like QoS, packet queues, Layer7 filtering and string / regular expression matching. Its feature list become even more impressive when you think about its suggested price: at about 60$, it can be a real best-seller.