A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof. I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and [...]
Percona Live – New York presentation slides now available
June 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
After the success of Percona Live in New York, we have published in our website the presentation slides of talks from the leading experts in MySQL. Check it out.
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
June 9, 2011 By 18 Comments
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
Must read talk from MySQL Conference and Expo
May 9, 2011 By 2 Comments
I started going over the slides from talks from MySQL Conference and Expo 2011 to pick set of must see presentations and publish the list, but this is not happening due to lack of time. Instead I’m only going to recommend 1 talk, from list of tutorials I had a chance to review. If you [...]
Where does HandlerSocket really save you time?
March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
HandlerSocket has really generated a lot of interest because of the dual promises of ease-of-use and blazing-fast performance. The performance comes from eliminating CPU consumption. Akira Higuchi’s HandlerSocket presentation from a couple of months back had some really good profile results for libmysql versus libhsclient (starting at slide 15). Somebody in the audience at Percona [...]
Percona Live is on Wednesday – thank you to all our sponsors
February 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Percona Live is in only two days away – and we’ve managed to completely sell out (something I predicted earlier). Before I go into details, I want to thank three sponsors who have been absolutely awesome: Clustrix is providing an open bar all evening, New Relic is providing all attendees with lunch and Fusion-io is [...]
Caching could be the last thing you want to do
July 24, 2010 By 14 Comments
I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching. Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]
Slides from my Sphinx talk at RIT++ 2010
April 14, 2010 By 1 Comment
While the majority of Percona gang travelled to California for the MySQL event of the year, I headed in the opposite direction to Moscow for RIT++ 2010 conference where I presented a talk on Sphinx. You can get the PDF file here – Improving MySQL-based applications performance with Sphinx. I have been invited [...]
When should you store serialized objects in the database?
January 21, 2010 By 47 Comments
A while back Friendfeed posted a blog post explaining how they changed from storing data in MySQL columns to serializing data and just storing it inside TEXT/BLOB columns. It seems that since then, the technique has gotten more popular with Ruby gems now around to do this for you automatically.
EdUIConf 2009 recap
October 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I spoke at EdUIConf 2009, a new conference in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. My presentation was on web interface performance; it’s basically a twist on front-end performance in general. I slanted the talk towards web developers, rather than assuming the audience has full control over their Apache configuration. The conference was relatively short — [...]
