It's a blog.
I’ve mentioned before about how the sync_binlog setting in MySQL can be especially slow on ext3. Of course, I wasn’t the first to discover this; the MySQL Performance Blog mentioned it months ago. I was reading through some of the slides I mentioned in my last post, and remembered that I’d left sync_binlog off on [...]
I think part of the thing I love about MySQL is the same thing I love about Firefox and Thunderbird. Even though I sometimes wonder if there are databases that would work better than MySQL or have fewer bugs, MySQL has an incredibly rich community that’s home to myriad fascinating projects. I’ve looked into MySQL [...]
I enabled APC, the Alternative PHP Cache, a while back. The basic premise is that it’s an opcode cacher, making up for the fact that PHP pages get compiled on each pageload. It also caches oft-used files, though. (Although, in theory, Linux ought to be caching oft-used files in RAM too, APC is a bit [...]
A really random thought just popped into my head… UNIX systems have their “swap” partition, a disk partition where unused stuff in RAM is “swapped out” to disk to make room for newer stuff in RAM. Of course, no hard drive is as fast as RAM, so you obviously want lots of RAM so you [...]
I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…) Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, [...]
In: Computers|OCD|Performance
26 Jul 2008I think I’ve alluded earlier to the fact that I’ve been trying to speed up some systems at home, and how some of them are really slow. (I’m starting to suspect Norton, actually, but more on that when I find out more.) I just came across this spiffy application, which will write and then read [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Interesting|Linux Tips|OCD|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves|Uncategorized
10 Jun 2008From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file… The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate [...]
It’s no secret that gzip is handy on UNIX systems for compressing files. But what I hadn’t really considered before is that you don’t have to create a huge file and then gzip it. You can simply pipe output through it and have it compressed on the fly. For example: [root@oxygen]# mysqldump –all-databases -p | [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves
8 May 2008I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.) As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML [...]
In: Ideas|Living|Performance|School
22 Mar 2008I have a homework assignment to interview three people (with jobs) and ask them the three skills necessary to succeed at their job. If you have a job, and think you’re able to perform it, would you be so kind as to answer? (And mention your position?) *efficient*