By Tim O'Reilly

We've long believed that one of the side-effects of Web 2.0 and the demands of the internet as platform is that more is required of web sites than ever before in terms of availability, performance, and scalability [Radar posts]. As a result, we've been doing a lot of publishing in that area, with titles such as Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Websites, Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling's High Performance MySQL, and now Steve Souders' High …

So yesterday I was at the Zend PHP conference giving a talk on EC2/S3
and deployment strategies for LAMP stacks in those environments.

It was a fun talk, and one of the types I really enjoy giving. It
wasn't about features, but on how to go out and make something. Even
after the talk was over I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon
talking to different individuals on how MySQL works in EC2 and EC2
like environments.

Other then the difficulty in building horizontal solutions compared
to vertical in EC2, I was pretty amazed at the energy at the
conference. There are a lot of startups at the moment, and there is a
need to find developers.

Which got me thinking about which languages to use. I am not a
language bigot (though I am quite fond of Objective C!). I tend to
use whatever allows me to get a job done.

…

So others know how I check out a fresh tree, here are instructions to building MySQL from mysql.bkbits.net, using the free bkf tool.

• in ~/code, do bkf clone bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community to clone to community tree down to your disk
• wait patiently, while bitkeeper attempts to suck some of your bandwidth
• now, do BUILD/compile-dist, and wait while MySQL builds
• you might find it handy to now get the test suite on your build, via make test
• run make dist, and you’ll have nice dandy source tarballs to go with your build for easy installation/distribution/etc.
• if you encounter problems, say with ndb (and you’re not testing against it), you can run make dist –ignore ndb for instance

If for some reason you don’t want the latest development tree, and say, are …

Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systems

[ Update Jan 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers were awarded Product of the Year 2007. ]

Sun launched the Chip-Level MultiThreading (CMT) era back in December 2005 with the release of the highly successful UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) chip, featured in the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems. With 8 cores, each with 4 hardware strands (or threads), these systems presented 32 CPUs and delivered an unprecedented amount of processing power in compact, eco-friendly packaging. The systems were referred to as CoolThreads servers because of their low power and cooling requirements.

Today Sun introduces the …

Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systems

[ Update Jan 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers were awarded Product of the Year 2007. ]

Sun launched the Chip-Level MultiThreading (CMT) era back in December 2005 with the release of the highly successful UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) chip, featured in the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems. With 8 cores, each with 4 hardware strands (or threads), these systems presented 32 CPUs and delivered an unprecedented amount of processing power in compact, eco-friendly packaging. The systems were referred to as CoolThreads servers because of their low power and cooling requirements.

Today Sun introduces the …

Simple Question:
When a script/function/class exports something, I name it “exporter”.
When it imports something, I name it “importer”.
How do I name it when it does both?

What do you think? Write your thoughts into the comments please. Thanks!

previous post

http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/rel/dpm-r3.tar.gz - tarball of r3
git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git - to get the latest code, always
http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm-export.tar.gz - a tarball of the latest code, for those unwilling to git it.

It's been way, way too long. Next release will be within a week and a half, and will try to stick to the once-a-week schedule from then on. There've been over 210 commits to the repo at this point. The speed has been picking up.

Notable changes:

- Resultsets are fully parseable and writeable! This …

previous post

http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/rel/dpm-r3.tar.gz - tarball of r3
git clone http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm.git - to get the latest code, always
http://consoleninja.net/code/dpm/dpm-export.tar.gz - a tarball of the latest code, for those unwilling to git it.

It's been way, way too long. Next release will be within a week and a half, and will try to stick to the once-a-week schedule from then on. There've been over 210 commits to the repo at this point. The speed has been picking up.

Notable changes:

- Resultsets are fully parseable and writeable! This …

I must be moving to another shard, having outgrown my current one. Its a manual operation.

Flickr tells me they’re moving my stuff around Incidentally, I can’t sign out. Or view the main page. Or any of the groups I’m subscribed to. Its completely locked. But it does take under-15 minutes… (at least for the load I have - ~11,500 images).

Update: Read John Allspaw’s comments at the HighScalability link to this blog post. He’s in-charge of operations, and an all round nice guy, and great presenter.

Technorati Tags: flickr, …

I've had a deadline in my head for the last week or so, though the
start of the deadline began months ago.

I was asked a question "why doesn't Archive prefetch blocks of data
from disk while decompressing the current block".

Excellent question which demanded that, I well... fix it. So... I do
some reading.

I have some options:

1) Write my own AIO package.
2) Use the Posix AIO.
3) Support native AIO.

Writing less code is always good. Tricking out a library around every
vendors native Posix AIO is well... a lot of work. Not terribly
rewarding either since the vendors aren't very careful about
compatibility with their native solutions.

Write my own? Well... posix! Posix has AIO, lets use that.

So I did. As previous posts pointed out, it worked great.

Well sort of.
…