You can't be oncall 24hours. That's broken. Human beings need sleep. An oncall rotation that has an individual oncall for 24 hours is a broken thing. And depending on the country it also rightfully violates labour laws.
Second you get paid when you work. Oncall is work. Now it might be less demanding work, so it might get paid a bit less than the 9-5 part, but it has to get paid. Do work, get paid. Simple rule, people should stop fucking with it. And again, labour laws show up here.
If you're oncall you can't shut the pager off. If shutting the pager off is a thing people"oncall" do it's a broken oncall culture. Since it's often a consequence of the first two problems, those must be fixed first.
You should not be asleep when you're oncall. Same issues as the last problem; same likely causes.
You also shouldn't be oncall often. One 12 hour / 7 day shift every six weeks is fine.
Also pages should not be common. They should be for real, actual issues. If you regularly get paged more than once per shift, your oncall shift is broken.
The fs caches the directories. So in a large, flat dir structure it has large, flat dirs it needs to cache.
Now I'm not sure how big the win will be for accounts since one assumes active vs. inactive accounts will be randomly spread around alphabetically. So loads of these smaller dirs will be loaded.
But for articles it should be a win since it's mainly the most recent ones that will be accessed so you'll have a hotspot and the vast majority of the directories won't be accessed.
Exactly. Everyone who forwards this story should get an email account with no spam/virus/crap processing on their mailbox.
I use google apps now, but when I ran my own mail server multiple binaries took a whack at every mail I received to decide if it was junk. I couldn't imagine modern email without doing that.
On a certain level they would be right to complain. Tarsnap has a flaw: buses.
The problem is that Tarsnap is one person. If Colin dies suddenly (in the sysadmin world, the primary cause of theoretical death is buses), you have a problem. Say your account is down to €10 and you have 100G of data stored in there when when the #10 express mows down Colin. You might not be able to get it back since you can't top up your account now unless your method of payment is fully automated on his side.
Looking over his website, I don't see if there is a Colin-backup plan anywhere. There should be. Until then Tarsnap should be one of your backup systems - not the only one.
There are more and more devs who have only worked with git. For them, they will find svn complex. They'll be used to using branches and svn will get in their way.
Git is complex for you. The mistake you're making is in not realising that's not universally true.
The problem with handovers is bogus - doctors can't work for weeks at a time so there have to be handovers. Figure that out.