How to unpack bzip2 faster using parallel approach?

There are multiple tools which claim option to decompress bzip2 in parallel:

• pbzip2
• lbzip2

Let's compare pbzip2 performance with reference singe thread bzip2:

$ time bzip2 -d /tmp/rib.bz2  --stdout > /dev/null

real 0m52.188s

user 0m52.019s

sys 0m0.160s

$ time pbzip2 -d /tmp/rib.bz2  --stdout > /dev/null

real 0m49.380s

user 0m49.473s

sys 0m0.241s

You may notice that we have no speed improvement at all which means that pbzip2 cannot do decompression in parallel for standard bz2 compressed files.

But lbzip2 actually can do it and it offers great performance improvement:

$ time bzip2 -d /tmp/rib.bz2  --stdout > /dev/null

real 0m52.790s

user 0m52.549s

sys 0m0.224s

$ time lbzip2 -d /tmp/rib.bz2   --stdout > /dev/null

real 0m8.604s

user 1m8.099s

sys 0m0.420s

It's 9 seconds vs 53 seconds. It's 6 times improvement on 8 CPU server. 

Conclusions: use lbzip2 for parallel decompression. 

How to disable systemd-resolved on Ubuntu 18.04 server with Netplan

NB! This guide is not applicable for Ubuntu 18.04 with Desktop environment, please use another one as you will need to change Network Manager configuration too.

In our case we decided to disable it because of non RFC compliant resolver in customer's network:

Jan 18 18:19:05 fastnetmon systemd-resolved[953]: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying  

First of all, confirm current DNS server:

sudo systemd-resolve --status|grep 'DNS Servers' 

Currently default configuration is following:

ls -la /etc/resolv.conf 

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Mar  2 17:23 /etc/resolv.conf -> ../run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf

You will need to stop and disable resolved:

sudo systemctl disable systemd-resolved.service

sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved.service 

Then remove symlink:

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf 

And add customer's configuration (replace x.x.x.x by IP address of DNS server in your network):

echo 'search companyname.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/resolv.conf

echo 'nameserver x.x.x.x' | sudo tee -a /etc/resolv.conf

echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' | sudo tee -a /etc/resolv.conf

echo 'nameserver 1.1.1.1' | sudo tee -a /etc/resolv.conf

After that, I can recommend rebooting and checking that DNS resolution works fine on this server.