I setup some more monitoring of imaginator.com related servers. If you are interested the graphs of system performance reveal some interesting trends. I know that I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that we have enough entropy being generated. Please don’t use it all up.
Yes, the comment is tongue-in-cheek but entropy is an important component of a unix system. It’s read from /dev/random or /dev/urandom (for slightly more random data) and used in any application that needs a random seed, particularly cryptographic tools or games. Systems lacking enough random data would use a dedicated hardware random number generator, or in the case of the Commodore 64, use the built in random number generator. The C64 really was way ahead of its time.
Next week I’ll be looking at how one resolves excess mutex locks using a /dev/null accelerator.
Should Anyone Ask 