Quickwipe

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 15:11:03 +0000

Wiping old hard drives is a total drag. If you have ever decommissioned a server with a couple of high-capacity SATA drives, you know exactly what I mean. Scurrying to write randomized bytes across several terabytes of magnetic platters can easily drag on for seventy or eighty hours.

If you try to run a naive dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX, you are bound to fail. Standard tool chains are throttled by the Linux page cache, buffer copying overhead, and CPU-bound random number generators.

Netbench

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 08:03:57 +0000

Benchmarking network systems is usually a static affair. You spin up ApacheBench or wrk, tell it to run at a fixed fifty concurrent connections for two minutes, and look at the resulting average latency.

But real-world traffic is never static. In the wild, servers face dynamic traffic surges, sudden micro-bursts, and predictable diurnal waves (like the slow ramp-up of users starting their workday followed by a quiet night-time dip).

To test how my network infrastructure and auto-scalers handle these fluid concurrency transitions, I built Netbench (written in Go, ofc). It is an high-concurrency network and HTTP traffic generator that dynamically scales its worker thread concurrency using real-time mathematical wave functions.

Systems on Daniel 'f0o' Preussker

Quickwipe

Netbench