How InnoDB performs a checkpoint at Xaprb [by Baron Schwartz {of Perconna, MySQL vendor }

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2011/01/29/how-innodb-performs-a-checkpoint/ An article about MySQL InnoDB checkpoint-ing mechanism written by Perconna folks. Read comments as well, several PostgreSQL core committers have participated in the discussion. “InnoDB’s checkpoint algorithm is not well documented. It is too complex to explain in even a long blog post, because to understand checkpoints, you need to understand a lot of other things that InnoDB does. I hope that explaining how InnoDB does checkpoints in high-level terms, with simplifications, will be helpful. A lot of the simplifications are because I do not want to explain the complexities of how the simple rules can be tweaked for optimization purposes, while not violating the ACID guarantees they enforce.” ...

How InnoDB handles REDO logging - MySQL Performance Blog [by Ewen Fortune]

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/02/03/how-innodb-handles-redo-logging/ How MySQL InnoDB implements transaction log, aka REDO (Oracle), aka WAL (PostgreSQL)

InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions - MySQL Performance Blog

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/04/04/innodb-flushing-theory-and-solutions/ blog posts that describes how MySQL InnoDB flushes data to disk (also see bgwriter, checkpoint_* parameters in PostgreSQL)

How not to post a security article | John Graham-Cumming

http://blog.jgc.org/2011/03/how-not-to-post-security-article.html an excellent follow up on a hoax story about Samsung installing keyloggers on its laptops.

[nginx forum post] Centralized logging for multiple servers

http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,1008,page=1 post on nginx forum that provides some insights about central logging / log collections

TCP Tuning Guide [Office of Science, DOE, US GOV]

http://fasterdata.es.net/TCP-tuning/ Excellent site provides both theoretical background and practical recommendation for the situation when you need to push limits of TCP links using regular OS and commodity hardware. Especially useful if you need to do it via long-haul fast TCP link, i.e. the situation when you normally use specialized networking hardware (read: cisco)