One of the simplest performance and load tests that can be performed on any web server is to measure the response time of a static HTTP GET request. If you measure how this response time degrades as more parallel connections issue the same request, you can get a basic understanding of the performance and scalability of a web server.

Anyone who's worked with Apache long enough is probably familiar with ab, the  load generator/benchmarking tool which is so wide-spread. This is a sad state of affairs as 'ab' is extremely flawed. I don't want to repeat it's flaws here, as Scott Oaks has done an excellent job of summarizing them. 

Another tool that is also popular is http_load, …

One of the simplest performance and load tests that can be performed on any web server is to measure the response time of a static HTTP GET request. If you measure how this response time degrades as more parallel connections issue the same request, you can get a basic understanding of the performance and scalability of a web server.

Anyone who's worked with Apache long enough is probably familiar with ab, the  load generator/benchmarking tool which is so wide-spread. This is a sad state of affairs as 'ab' is extremely flawed. I don't want to repeat it's flaws here, as Scott Oaks has done an excellent job of summarizing them. 

Another tool that is also popular is http_load, …

In a previous post I described how you could create XML output from SQL using stored functions. But that was a flat structure, with only one table and simple XML structure with a tag for every row in the result set, and column values as attributes or sub tags. Part of the real power of the XML format is that it supports more complicated structures, with hierarchical data. If you need to produce XML for integration with another application you will probably have to produce a XML with data from several tables, and a hierarchical structure. To accomplish this in MySQL we can use the GROUP_CONCAT function, combined with our XML stored functions.

An example:
We take our select statement from the previous post, that gives us a list of tables in xml format:

select xml_tag('table',null, concat(xml_attr('name',t.table_name),
xml_attr('engine',t.engine)),null)
from information_schema.tables t
where …

While it would seem that using Mugshot is for core Linux geeks (it runs on Windows too, you know), I’ve not seen much adoption of the MySQL Mugshot Group, that was announced back in February. I’ve always enjoyed getting the Mugshot client running on my desktop informing me of new RSS feeds in Planet MySQL, so I can read new blog entries relatively quickly.

A new notification method has come upon us - its Twitter. When all is hunky dory, you get IMs or SMSes the moment a post is made from someone you’re following. So I give you the Twitter Planet …

JasperSoft Corporation and MySQL AB today announced the general availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition 2.0. This updated offering provides significant new features for easier integration and customization, targeted to software ISVs and OEMs seeking an interactive reporting solution to embed in their own MySQL-based products.

Since writing the mmMySQL macro a few weeks ago I have been looking for a way to produce impressive Graphs that would compliment the textual output from the macro.

Creating good looking Graphs often means resorting to Matplotlib in Python, GD in Perl/PHP or RRDTool. The result of these tools is often a static image depicting an historical view of your data, something that does not lend well to a non-daemonized Wiki page. That got me thinking…..how could I embed a graph into the webpage and collect data at the same time?…..a Java Applet!

After a quick search for a …

If you’d take a look at any web site, you will notice, that almost all of the pages on this given site are pretty static in their nature. Or course, this site could have some dynamic elements like login field or link in the header, some customized menu elements and some other things… But entire page could be considered static in many cases.

When I started thinking about my sites from this point of view, I understood, how great it would be to be able to cache entire page somewhere (in memcache for example) and be able to send it to the user without any requests to my applications, which are pretty slow (comparing to memcache ) in content generation. Then I came up with a pretty simple and really powerful idea I’ll describe in this article. An idea of caching entire pages of the site and using my application only to generate small partials of the page. This idea allows me to handle hundreds of queries with one server running pretty slow …

MySQL Slave Delay implements an oft-requested replication feature: the ability to make a slave lag its master, a.k.a scheduling binlog events for some time in the future. This will probably be built into MySQL replication someday, but in the meantime, you can use this tool. A delayed slave is great if disaster strikes and propagates through replication, because it lets you stop the delayed slave before it gets corrupted, restart the slave until just before the offending statement, and recover quickly. This is a lot faster than restoring last night's full backup and replaying a day's worth of binary logs on the master.

mtstat is now totally on launchpad. You can even download files.

I moved a few things around for 0.7.3. The MySQL plugins are now in mysql.mtstat instead of mtstat_mysql. (To go along with my putting the NDB/Connectors Python stuff in mysql.cluster - I'm trying to make a mysql namespace here) And I split up the mysqlqps plugin into mysqlqps, mysqlhandler and mysqlqcache. You can do multiple plugins like:


mtstat -Mmysqlqps,mysqlhandler

And you'll get output like:

_uptime __sel__ __ins__ __del__ __upd__ _quest_|___hf__ __hnxt_ __hkey_ __rrnd_ __rnxt_

1998k      0       0       0       0       0 |     0       0       0       0       0

1998k     80       8       0       5     411 |     0     359     364       5   10144

1998k     27       8 …

Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse.

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in …