The Joyent Accelerator for MySQL is apparently 2-4 times faster than an EC2 instance, but there's no mention of configuration, database size or even what the queries were in their record breaking performance tests.

I assume that Joyent has tuned their MySQL install, so it only seems fair not to use the default configuration on the EC2 test. If you look at Vadim's EBS benchmarks (particularly random read/write) it looks like they may have a very good product, but instead we're left with the impression that they have something to hide.

1,245 transactions per second isn't very much these days if they …

So during preparation of XtraDB template for EC2 I wanted to understand what IO characteristics we can expect from EBS volume ( I am speaking about single volume, not RAID as in my previous post). Yasufumi did some benchmarks and pointed me on interesting behavior, there seems several level of caching on EBS volume.

Let me show you. I did sysbench random read IO benchmark on files with size from 256M to 5GB with step 256M. And, as Morgan pointed me, I previously made first write, to avoid first-write penalty:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdk bs=1M

for reference script is:

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. #!/bin/sh
2. set -u
3. set -x
…

During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID from several volumes.

So I created 4 volumes ( I used m.large instance), and made:

RAID0 on 2 volumes as:
mdadm -C /dev/md0 --chunk=256 -n 2 -l 0 /dev/sdj /dev/sdk


RAID0 on 4 volumes as:
mdadm -C /dev/md0 --chunk=256 -n 4 -l 0 /dev/sdj /dev/sdk /dev/sdl /dev/sdm

RAID5 on 3 volumes as:
mdadm -C /dev/md0 --chunk=256 -n 3 -l 5 /dev/sdj /dev/sdk /dev/sdl


RAID10 on 4 volumes in two steps:

mdadm -v --create /dev/md0 --chunk=256 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 …

Of course it’s not quite that simple. I’ve just decomissioned an old Red Hat 7.1 box (hosted dedicated server) that had been in service since 2002, so about 7 years. Specs? Celeron 1.3GHz, 512M, 60GB HD. Not too bad in the RAM and disk realm. It did a good job but goodness am I glad to be rid of it!

Not having that box online is safer for the planet, although it (perhaps amazingly considering the age of some of the externally facing software components) has never been compromised – I consider that mostly luck, by the way, I’m not naive about that. But it’s not easy to move off old servers, it’s generally (and also has been in this case) a lot of work.

Of course hosting has moved on since 2002, places like Linode offer more for less money/month. Of course they virtualise (Xen based in this case) and that’s not been my favourite (particularly for DB servers but depending …

Microsoft contributes to Linux. Acquia raises $8m. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Microsoft contributes to Linux
Microsoft announced that it is to contribute device driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Prompting us to publish a CAOS Theory Q&A. Answering one questioning we failed to ask, ZDnet reported that Microsoft’s Linux contributions should find their way into the 2.6.32 release.

Acquia raises $8m
Mass High Tech …

Join the Sun and Kickfire team tomorrow to see the unveiling of the Kickfire’s On-Demand Trial. You can sign up for the live webinar and trial review here: http://tinyurl.com/kickfiretrial.

At Kickfire we’re very excited about this launch. We’ve had many customers who have asked for a quick way to trial the system to get a sense of the performance. In order to speed up setup time we are providing users with access to US Bureau of Transportation’s database. This database contains flight data from the last twenty years. The trial consists of four parts:

1) An overview of Kickfire and its technology (includes a short Flash movie)
2) An interactive tutorial of a couple of sample queries. The tutorial explains the DB schema, the SQL and the Kickfire features that get performance
3) A pick list of sample queries and comparison times against MySQL …

Funding for Aptana and Jolicloud. Ingres targets MySQL. Trent Reznor on Open Core (sort of). And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Funding
# Aptana raised $7.8m in funding from Rembrandt Venture Partners and Accel Partners.

# Jolicloud raised $4.2m in series A funding for a Linux-based Netbook OS.

Not with a bang…
# Sun reported preliminary revenues for Q4 2009 of $2.58bn to $2.68bn, compared to $3.78bn a year ago.

Best of the rest
# Ingres …

The question "what problems will I have when migrating to the cloud" gets asked often enough. If by cloud you mean Amazon EC2, then from a technical perspective there isn't much that changes. The biggest thing that changes is just how you pay your bill.

Having said that, there's still a few potential gotchas:

1. There are no Virtual IP addresses. Most High Availability tools (like MMM or DRBD+Heartbeat)
   work on the principal of having a floating IP address which is used for the application to connect to the current master. With EC2, you can't do this.
2. There's no customization of the memory. The maximum amount of memory you can have is 15GB, so some users with larger working sets may find this a limitation. If you look at the Dell online store, it costs $2094 to upgrade an R900 from 4G memory to 64G (or $4378 to upgrade to 128G) which …