Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry

As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to see what the “best case” compression ratio was for our dataset (InnoDB tables)
2. I wanted to see what the “worst case” CPU usage was for our workload
3. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to try something quick & dirty.

I got both those data points with enough granularity to be useful: a 2.12X compression ratio over a …

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

Ever since Peter over at Percona wrote about MySQL and swap, I’ve been meaning to write this post. But after I saw Dathan Pattishall’s post on the subject, I knew I’d better actually do it.

There’s a nasty problem with Linux 2.6 even when you have a ton of RAM. No matter what you do, including setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness = 0, your OS is going to prefer swapping stuff out rather than freeing up system cache. On a single-use machine, where the application is better at utilizing RAM than the system is, this is incredibly stupid. Our MySQL boxes are a perfect example – they run only MySQL and we want InnoDB to have a lot of RAM (32-64GB …

I know I’m a little late to the discussion, but Brian Aker posted a thought-provoking piece on the imminent death of MySQL replication to scale reads.  His premise is that memcached is so cool and scales so much better, that read replication scaling is going to become a think of the past.  Other MySQL community people, like Arjen and Farhan, chimed in too.

Now, I love memcached.  We use it as a vital layer in our datacenters, and we couldn’t live without it.  But it’s not a total solution to all …

There’s quite a bit of buzz on the blogosphere from people I respect a great deal, like Jeremy Cole at Proven Scaling and Vadim at Percona, about MySQL’s new Enterprise backup plans.  

The big deal?  They’re releasing a Community version that doesn’t have all the same features as the Enterprise version of Online Backup, including compression and encryption.  The Community version is open-sourced under GPL, the Enterprise version is not.

Personally, I think this is awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I love open source.  We couldn’t have built our business without it, and we love it when we get a chance to contribute back to the community.

But …

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always …