Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Worse than DDOS
Today I worked on rather interesting customer problem. Site was subject what was considered DDOS and solution was implemented to protect from it. However in addition to banning the intruders IPs it banned IPs of web services which were very actively used by the application which caused even worse problems by consuming all apache slots [...]
Lighttpd as reverse proxy
We often recommend to set lighttpd in front of apache to handle http requests (more about http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/05/21/speedup-your-lamp-stack-with-lighttpd/ ) , redirect dynamic requests to apache and handle static files by itself. I just gathered step-by-step instruction how to do that in 10 minutes, as it may be not so obvious.
Top 5 Wishes for MySQL
About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]
Commodity Hardware, Commodity Software and Commodity People
In the previous post I mentioned not all architectures and solutions work for Commodity People, and people seems to agree with me. Number of vendors would claim they are in Commodity Software or Hardware business but few would probably mention they are doing it for Commodity People, because few people would like to be called [...]
Content delivery system design mistakes
This week I helped dealing with performance problems (part MySQL related and part related to LAMP in general) of system which does quite a bit of content delivery, serving file downloads and images – something a lot of web sites need to do these days. There were quite a bit of mistakes in design for [...]
Why do you need many apache children ?
I already wrote kind of about same topic a while ago and now interesting real life case makes me to write again Most Web applications we’re working with have single tier web architecture, meaning there is just single set of apache servers server requests and nothing else – no dedicated server for static content, no [...]
Are PHP persistent connections evil ?
As you probably know PHP “mysql” extension supported persistent connections but they were disabled in new “mysqli” extension, which is probably one of the reasons some people delay migration to this extension. The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster [...]
Back from OpenSource Database Conference
I’m just back from OpenSource Database Conference and PHP International Conference which took place in Frankfurt. I’ve uploaded slides for two talks I’ve been giving which you might want to check out. In general Database portion of the conference was a bit boring. May be because it was not widely announced or may be for [...]
Life Beyond MySQL
When I was leaving MySQL I wrote I will be doing some Web projects on my own, besides doing MySQL Consulting. I think some people thought I am just using that as an excuse and really I will only do consulting. So I’m pretty happy to announce my first project. NNSEEK Is NewsGroup search engine, [...]

