Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Chief Justice John Roberts did not actually use PACER fees to buy a new chair. That's just a hypothetical example. (credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

If you need documents from federal court cases, you're in luck. Almost every brief, exhibit, and legal ruling is available for download from the judiciary's PACER website. But there's a catch: documents cost 10 cents a page.

In 2016, three nonprofit organizations, the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice sued the federal courts—in federal court. The class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of all fee-paying PACER users, argued that these hefty charges were illegal. Federal law allows the courts to charge fees "only to the extent necessary" to provide public access to information. Over the last 15 years, the cost of storage and bandwidth has plunged. Yet PACER's fees have actually risen from 7 cents to 10 cents. These fees have raised far more money than it costs to run the PACER system: $146 million in 2016 alone.

In a 2018 ruling, Judge Ellen Huvelle largely agreed with the plaintiffs, concluding that the courts are breaking the law by spending PACER money on non-PACER projects like installing flat-screen TVs in courtrooms and sending electronic notifications to bankruptcy creditors. On Monday, the case reached the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where three judges heard oral arguments from each side. Judges seemed skeptical of the arguments of government lawyers representing the judiciary.

Enlarge / Ars Technica does not recommend removing the protective cover from your hard disk or setting it on fire in production settings. (credit: William Warby)

Storage benchmarking—much like Wi-Fi benchmarking—is a widely misunderstood black art. Admins and enthusiasts have for decades been tempted to just "get the big number" by reading or writing a large amount of data to a disk, getting a figure in MB/sec, and calling it a day. Unfortunately, the actual workload of a typical disk doesn't look like that—and that "simple speed test" doesn't reproduce a lot of the bottlenecks that slow down disk access in real-world systems.

The most realistic way to test and benchmark disks is, of course, to just use them and see what happens. Unfortunately, that's neither very repeatable, nor is it simple to analyze. So we do want an artificial benchmarking tool—but we want one that we can use intelligently to test storage systems across realistic scenarios that model our day-to-day usage well. Fortunately, we don't have to invent such a tool—there's already a free and open source software tool called fio, and it's even cross-platform!

We're going to walk you through some simple but effective uses of fio on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers—but before we do that, let's talk a little bit about storage systems from a more basic perspective.