The Database Management System PostgreSQL uses lightweight locks (LWLocks) to control access to shared memory data structures. In this article, the tool pg_lw_lock_trace is presented that allows tracing these kinds of locks. The tool can be downloaded from the website of the project. This is the second article that deals with tracing PostgreSQL locks. The first article deals with the tracing of heavyweight locks and can be found here.

The DBMS PostgreSQL uses locks to synchronize access to resources like tables. To get more information about the locks, the table pg_locks shows which relation is currently locked by which process. However, this relation shows only the current state of the locks. To show the locking activity in real-time, the new lock tracing tool pg_lock_tracer can be used. pg_lock_tracer is an open-source tool that I have just recently created. It can be downloaded from the website of the project.

Reading and writing data from mass storage (volumes) is a quite common pattern in software. However, some time elapses between starting the I/O request (i.e., reading or writing data) and the completion of the request. The elapsed time to complete the request is called I/O latency. Older magnetic hard disks need some time to position the head on the right track of the magnetic disk. Also, newer flash-based disks like SSDs need some time to read the data. In addition, at common cloud providers, different types of block volumes are available that provide a different I/O latency. With the software ioping, this latency can be measured.

Docker is one of the most popular runtimes for Containers these days. Often the services in the containers offer a web interface. To ensure that this service can be accessed securely (via HTTPs) on the standard port 443/tcp, reverse proxies are usually used. The reverse proxy receives the incoming requests on port 443, provides the appropriate TLS certificate and distributes the traffic depending on the URL to the respective containers. For a long time, Nginx was the quasi-standard for this task. However, Traefik has also been used for some time. This reverse proxy is discussed in this article.

No one wants to create backups; everyone just wants to be able to restore data – that’s the old saying in IT. However, to be able to restore data, backups need to be created on a regular basis. To ensure that major disasters can be survived, the backups should be stored in a different location. In this article, the software Duplicity is used to create automated backups and store them on an AWS S3 bucket in the AWS cloud. These backups are encrypted using GPG.