I am pleased to announce the release of Wordcraft 0.8.  I have managed to release about once a month since November.  I also have actually gotten some feedback and tickets posted.  Thanks to those that have tried it out.

I have decided to go back to YUI's Editor.  I tried TinyMCE in the last release.  But, using it full time I found it messed with my HTML too much for my liking.  When I would switch to raw HTML mode and add something like a <code> tag, it would be lost when saving the data back into the WYSIWYG editor.

I also converted the admin HTML to HTML 4.01 Transitional.  I never use XHTML anymore these days.  So, I was writing invalid XHTML inadvertantly.

I worked on the session handling some more in this release.  Users should stay logged in to the admin …

John Goulah wrote a nice quick tutorial to MySQL Sandbox.
Thanks, John!

We modified the iiBench benchmark to perform deletions as well as insertions, and compared InnoDB to Tokutek's Fractal TreeTM storage engine, both running on MySQL 5.1. I'll post the revised iiBench tarball soon.

Here is what the performance looks like:

The iiBench-with-deletions benchmark works as follows. The benchmark employs a fact table with an autoincremented primary key. First it inserts 250M rows (1000 rows per INSERT statement). Then it treats the fact table as a FIFO: every time it inserts 1000 rows at the end, it deletes 1000 rows from the beginning. The benchmark maintains three indexes as data is inserted and deleted. As usual for iiBench, the three indexes exhibit a lot of entropy (that is, they are essentially random).

In the graph above, the X-axis shows the number of items inserted so far. The Y axis shows the number of insertions per second (insertions/s), where each data point …

Time for a dump of some lessons learnt from my blog posting “On Open Source and Open Competition in a not-so-Open World“.

Let me start by a recap of what the process looked from my point of view:

1. My close colleague gets his visa rejected. He is a seasoned Australia visitor, so I assumed (and still assume) he knew what he was doing.
2. We connect the dots between the rejection and an IM discussion from August 2008 (see comment #29 on my blog), related to competition and Sun employees being let into Australia. Due to the nature of how visa rejections work, I cannot prove this is the case (even with the additional …

A few weeks ago I reported InnoDB performance on the iiBench 1-billion row insert test. Today I'm reporting on Tokutek's Fractal TreeTM storage engine performance.

We ran iiBench on the same hardware (Sun x4150, 8 cores @ 3.16GHz, 16GB memory, 6 SAS disk HW RAID 0) using Tokutek's storage engine for MySQL. The performance looks like

Our engine consumed 20.2 hours elapsed time, and inserted the last 10M rows at a rate of 11,220 rows/second. In contrast, InnoDB finished the test in 207.5 hours, inserting the last 10M rows at a rate of 876 rows/second. For our engine, the my.cnf file has no special parameters defined - the test was run with default parameters. By default, Tokutek uses 50% of the physical memory for its buffer pool. That works well for a broad range of physical memory …

At OpenSQL Camp in November we presented a challenge to insert one billion rows, maintaining indexes, into a MySQL table. The best results we have seen are:

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

We re-ran iiBench based on Mark Callaghan's excellent work. We used standard InnoDB engine in MySQL 5.1 without the Google or Percona patches. Our hardware is similar to Mark's except we used a 6-disk hardware RAID 0, whereas Mark employed a 10-disk software RAID 0. We ran on the same hardware as we did before, a Sunfire x4150 with 8 cores and 16GB of memory, and we made the following changes compared to our original run:

• 6 SATA disk HW RAID 0 (original run on 6 disk HW RAID 5)
• 1,000 rows inserted per SQL INSERT statement
• Used my.cnf settings based on what Mark did and what Percona suggested. …

This is the 1st post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series. | Post 2 »

Christmas is nearly upon the Christian and Consumerist parts of the globe. Along much of my latitude, snow is piling up in record quantities and weather warnings abound. Even in oft-green Vancouver, there is a foot or so of the white stuff accumulated in my yard and the parking lot outside my window often echos with the sounds of snow-beached cars helplessly spinning their wheels.

Usually all these things taken together would mean a series of harrowing drives to visit family, followed by lovely hours staying warm indoors, eating comfort food, retelling old stories and enjoying the company of loved ones as the year draws to its close.

However, this year our family time is coming after the holidays and I'm left with the unexpected gift of a week or so of free time.

…

I am pleased to announce the release of Wordcraft 0.6.  I have been using it for a month or so now and I am learning some things.

I had been having trouble logging in lately from multiple places.  So, instead of trying to work on the built in session handling I had written, I took my own advice (use stuff that exists) and just switched to PHP sessions.  All the cookie stuff is worked out and I can get a lot done with just a little work.  PHP sessions make me a little nervous.  If you have lots of applications installed on the same site that use them, you can get some odd behavior.  But, why reinvent the wheel right?

I have found myself wanting to save a post while working on it.  To do that before, I would have to uncheck the Published box.  To solve this, I changed the behavior of the Save …