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 [...]
Economics of Performance Optimization
I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]
TMP_TABLE_SIZE and MAX_HEAP_TABLE_SIZE
We all know disk based temporary tables are bad and you should try to have implicit temporary tables created in memory where possible, do to it you should increase tmp_table_size to appropriate value and avoid using blob/text columns which force table creation on the disk because MEMORY storage engine does not support them Right ? [...]
Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization
Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average [...]
Slow Query Log analyzes tools
MySQL has simple but quite handy feature – slow query log, which allows you to log all queries which took over define number of seconds to execute. There is also an option to enable logging queries which do not use indexes even if they take less time (–log-queries-not-using-indexes) Slow query log is great to spot [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
How Web Services world affect LAMP Stack
In connection to my previous post I was thinking how Web 2.0 with its massive use of Web Services affect LAMP Stack ? Well actually there are serious difference both for client and server application development which you might want to take into account. If you’re developing Web Service Server application you will most likely [...]

