Overview:Peter Zaitsev's recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.I don't have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of

Overview:

Peter Zaitsev’s recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.

I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.

I don’t have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of 2006 when Amazon EC2 was launched, you can (even in Australia) pick up Dual and Quad Core CPUs with enough memory for 32 …

2>.\my_lwrite.c(31) : warning C4996: ‘write’: The POSIX name for this item is deprecated. Instead, use the ISO C++ conformant name: _write. See online help for details.

WTF.

If Visual Studio 2008 crashes one more time today….

NetBeans 6.1 Beta was released last week. Amongst the many improvements, one of them is the bundled JRuby 1.1 RC2 and Rails 2.0.2. The jMaki plugin used to work fine with Rails 1.2.3 but need to be updated because of changed file name extensions for the default generated views (".rhtml.erb" instead of ".rhtml"). With this release of NetBeans, jMaki plugin has been updated to work in this configuration as well.

This blog provide detailed steps to install jMaki plugin, create a simple Rails 2.0 application using NetBeans IDE and update the generated scaffold to use a Yahoo Data Table widget for displaying the …

Old school technologists don't think kindly of PHP. Its adepts are believed to be sloppy programmers that create brittle applications. It takes programmers like Sebastian Bergman to level the score and to show that a good programmer is shown by best practices, not by the choice of language.
The best thing a good programmer can do while developing an application is testing. Sebastian shows why you should do it, and how. Not only that, it will show you how easy it is. At the end of …

After Dublin, our next stop on the World Tour was Sweden. While several MySQLers were out on travel (in Dublin, amongst other places!) related to the Sun-MySQL integration, we had the opportunity to meet with Swedish MySQL employees from various parts of the organisation, including Sales, Engineering, Support, and Internal IT.

Yesterday’s dinner at Domtrappkällaren was a memorable one, with an opportunity to share war stories and anecdotes with our Sun colleagues Dave Douglas and Julie Ross. They got their fair share of tales from past MySQL Developer Meetings (ah, Prague! ohh, Sorrento!) and Staff Meetings (you wouldn’t believe what happened to this new guy in Sales on his first day, when arriving at his hotel room in Cancùn).

Equally important, we took time to look at what will happen next. Swedes will in short order be on-boarded, which involves everything form signing papers to getting their first salary from Sun, as …

If you’ve ever worked in companies with 5-10+ servers and it was your responsibility to install new boxes, change some configuration files and install new software on many boxes you definitely know how painful this work is. Every time you need to change something on 3-5-100 boxes, you go there and make those changes. Most experienced of us used some weird scripts to perform some task on many boxes or used some stuff like dsh. Even with those tricks I’d never wish this work to anyone.

While I was working in Galt, I’ve asked our junior admin to check out puppet and try to use it on our servers. After a week of screaming he’s managed to install and configure it and …

My wife has a site that needs two WordPress blog installations. The URLs differ by a subdirectory name. Both blogs need to be (URL-wise) subdirectories of /blog/. They need to be completely independent of each other, yet use the same custom theme. And there used to be just a single blog, which was not in a subdirectory; its permalinks must not break. (It has nice URLs with the date and title in them, not post ID-style URLs). And because I’m the husband, I get to maintain it, so tack “easy to maintain” onto the requirements (it must be easy to upgrade WP in both blogs, for example). In this article I’ll show you how I did it with a single .htaccess file, a single copy of WordPress, two MySQL databases, and a single configuration file.

Fixing URLs

As I mentioned, there used to be a blog at /blog/ which must not break. Suppose this blog was about dogs and my wife has recently started blogging about cats. She wants two …

I’ve been waving my hands about lower bounds.  Well, sometimes I haven’t been waving my hands, because the lower bounds are tight.  But in other cases (lenient insertions, range queries), the lower bounds are very far from what we’re used to.

So now, for a bit of math:

Brodal and Fagerberg showed in 2003 that there’s a tradeoff between insertions and queries.  The insertions they consider are lenient.  Well, any lower bound for lenient is a lower bound for strict, but they also gave upper bounds, so it matters.  Also, they don’t know from lenient, but if you look at their upper bound, they are implementing lenient insertions.  The queries they consider are, unfortunately, point queries.  That’s too bad for us, because we’ve already seen that point queries are just too slow to be of interest on hard disks.

Still, they have matching upper and lower bounds, so let’s see …

Since my previous laptop is temporarily out of service, I am using a new one with Mac OS X Leopard. Which is cool, and it has great enhancements. However, after a few hours of usage, I noticed a sudden increase of CPU activity (+50%), for no apparent reason.
The resource monitor fingered a process named "mdworker", and Google took me to a page explaining that the real culprit is spotlight, which is indexing the disk contents.
Since I needed all the CPU power of my laptop to compile the latest server, I asked Google again, and I found a page with a method to disable Spotlight permanently. The recommended method involves root access, changing attributes of a long list of files, and a reboot. (!!!)
I could not afford the luxury of a …