A tip of the hat to Mark Callaghan, who suggested I post our my.cnf settings for iiBench.

Instead of fiddling around with the configuration file, we adjusted everything on the command line. Here's the relevant script from iiBench/scripts/start_mysql.sh:

#
# Script to start the mysqld process.
# - Documents mysqld parameters used for iiBench testing.
#
DATADIR="/usr/local/mysql/data"
MYSQL_PATH="/usr/local/mysql/bin"

# These parameters were selected for a test machine with:
# - 16GB of memory
# - 2 socket, quad core = 8 cores total.

PARAM=" \
--no-defaults \
--user=mysql  \
--datadir=$DATADIR \
--max_connections=3000 \
--max_connect_errors=10 \
--table_cache=2048 \
--max_allowed_packet=1M \
--binlog_cache_size=1M \
--max_heap_table_size=64M \
--sort_buffer_size=64M \
--read_buffer_size=64M \
--join_buffer_size=64M \ …

I’d like to advertise my previous iiBench posting again (now that we are feeding into PlanetMySQL.)

At the recent OpenSQL Camp in Charlottesville, VA, Tokutek offered a challenge to the MySQL community - who can insert a billion rows into MySQL the fastest?  We will post the results on our website and the winner gets a $100 Starbucks card, along with valuable bragging rights.

Tokutek’s technical founders (Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, and I), in our academic roles (at Stony Brook, Rutgers, and MIT, respectively) have been investigating how to maintain indexes for large databases.  Part of the challenge for this kind of research is to figure out what to measure.

Some other benchmarks, such as TPC-H and SSB, measure bulk load time rather than insertions.  We are interested in the case where you must insert a small number of rows at a time at a high rate, and keep the index up-to-date.  Indexed insertions are interesting in situations with high incoming data rates and a desire to concurrently query on …

Well, I blogged about Wordcraft the other day.  I have just been running live on the software for 4 days now.  Well, that post had no URI associated with it.  It took me two days to figure this out.  Oops.  Welcome to eating my own dog food.  So, running this live with actual users (and a host of bot spam attempts) I am learning a lot and making a lot of commits.  So, I may very well roll once or twice a week for the first few weeks.

So, with that, I have packaged 0.5.  There are 15 changes in this package.  Some features, but mostly bug fixes.  So, if you could use a simple blog, give it a try and help me debug it.  If you do, please use the Google Code …

So, a while back, not sure when, I was listening to the P3 Podcast and Paul mentioned his dislike for Wordpress.  He said he wished there was a simple blogging application.  I am probably misquoting him horribly.  It was an idea that I had been tinkering with.  So, I started on Wordcraft in my spare time.  Like super spare time.  That time between the kids going to bed and me falling  asleep.  So, it took a while to get it to a usable state.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging.  It works quite well.  You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need.  My wife uses Blogger for our family blog.  It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways.  But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice.

So, why would I want to reinvent the …

So, a while back, not sure when, I was listening to the P3 Podcast and Paul mentioned his dislike for Wordpress.  He said he wished there was a simple blogging application.  I am probably misquoting him horribly.  It was an idea that I had been tinkering with.  So, I started on Wordcraft in my spare time.  Like super spare time.  That time between the kids going to bed and me falling  asleep.  So, it took a while to get it to a usable state.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging.  It works quite well.  You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need.  My wife uses Blogger for our family blog.  It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways.  But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice.

So, why would I want to reinvent the …

Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through …

To understand a bit of Italian, I just need a comparatively small amount of vino bianco. By contrast, to get any information flow going at all in Russian requires larger amounts of … preparation. That doesn’t have to be vodka, it can also be interesting discussions with Russians, or the opportunity to give a speech.

Now, a blog is the scalable way to interact with the rest of humanity, and I’m trying to increase my fluency in all things Web 2.0. So, here goes, may I present my Russian blog:

Like in the case of presenting my Italian blog, let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

…

Given that I don’t speak Italian, it may seem a bit strange that I just started an Italian language blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/dolce_vita/:

But I do have a point with my blog. Let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

“Of all the languages that I do not speak, I speak Italian the best.”

This is my motto when it comes to speaking Italian. Moreover, Italy is my favorite …

I just started a new blog on photography, in German. It’s based in http://blogs.arno.fi/foto/ and so far only has just four entries — one on a photo session with fashion photographer Riccardo Desiderio, one on my ensuing autumn portraits of my wife along the Isar here in Munich, one on fun underwater photography ( …