Compute, memory and storage
Servers & hardware
Explore how CPU, memory, disk and physical design constraints influence server behavior.
- comparison
CPU cores vs threads for web workloads
SMT lets hardware threads share a physical core. More logical processors therefore do not guarantee the same workload capacity as the same number of independent physical cores.
Explore the idea - concept
RAM, paging and swap pressure
Memory pressure can trigger reclaim, eligible swap activity or an out-of-memory condition. Swap provides backing for some pages but does not replace RAM performance or guarantee allocation success.
Explore the idea - comparison
Storage IOPS, throughput and latency
IOPS counts operations, throughput counts transferred bytes and latency measures delay. Operation size connects the two rates, but neither rate alone establishes request latency.
Explore the idea - comparison
RAID redundancy vs backups
RAID redundancy can preserve access during some disk failures, but it does not replace an independently retained backup for recovering an earlier state.
Explore the idea - comparison
Virtual machines vs containers
A virtual machine can run its own guest kernel; an ordinary Linux container shares the host kernel. This boundary alone does not establish which environment is safer or faster.
Explore the idea - troubleshooting
Find a server resource bottleneck
Distinguish CPU, memory, storage and network bottlenecks by matching resource-wait evidence to the slow requests, workload scope and time window. A busy resource is a candidate to investigate, not proof that it delayed the affected work.
Explore the idea - comparison
NVMe vs SATA storage interfaces
NVMe and SATA describe storage communication, not flash media. Device capabilities, interface and workload are separate factors; an interface name alone does not establish application performance.
Explore the idea
Start with bounded synthetic models and verify actual hardware or operating-system conditions separately.