One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

I have had the privilege to go to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 4 of the past 5 years.  During that time, it has been held in beautiful Portland, Oregon.  Well, the OSCON 2009 web site is up and they are moving it to San Jose, CA.  I have never been to the San Jose Convention Center.  The pictures look nice.  I have only been to San Jose at all to get off a plane and go to the Santa Clara Convention Center.  I hope San Jose has more to offer than Santa …

I'm not planning on a Part IV! :) I wrote these articles last summer and decided to post them to the blog so they didn't get lost.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

I'm not planning on a Part IV! :) I wrote these articles last summer and decided to post them to the blog so they didn't get lost.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Introduction

Using the tools and techniques from Part II, we'll look at the areas of Drupal that can be improved. We'll go over queries, indexes and mysql configuration. This will be based upon loading the home page only.

Initial Load

Looking at a single loading of the home page produces a total of 122 SELECT queries, 3 SET commands, and 2 UPDATES. Only 30 SELECTS are unique, so there's plenty of duplicated queries. The slow query log contains 5 queries when the system is loaded with 10 concurrent connections for a 30 second period. The queries in the slow query log could also be queries that are not using indexes. We'll start with these queries first.

Slow Query Log

mysql» SELECT name, filename, throttle FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 ORDER BY weight ASC, filename ASC;
…

Introduction

Using the tools and techniques from Part II, we'll look at the areas of Drupal that can be improved. We'll go over queries, indexes and mysql configuration. This will be based upon loading the home page only.

Initial Load

Looking at a single loading of the home page produces a total of 122 SELECT queries, 3 SET commands, and 2 UPDATES. Only 30 SELECTS are unique, so there's plenty of duplicated queries. The slow query log contains 5 queries when the system is loaded with 10 concurrent connections for a 30 second period. The queries in the slow query log could also be queries that are not using indexes. We'll start with these queries first.

Slow Query Log

mysql» SELECT name, filename, throttle FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 ORDER BY weight ASC, filename ASC;
…

Introduction

  This paper will outline my test environment, software used and procedures for benchmarking and profiling. This process can apply to both scaling up and scaling out architectures. Scaling out will require a slightly different approach due to the fact that the entire webserver suite and/or MySQL will be split across multiple servers. 

Test System

  My test system is an AMD 2100 with 2GB RAM and single PATA harddrive. (Stop laughing.) It has XAMPP 1.6.6 installed which contains Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51a with eAccelerator turned off. Drupal 5.7 and the devel module have been installed. The test Drupal site contains 5000 nodes, with 50,000 comments, 5000 vocabulary and terms with a max length of 12. These first attempts at improving Drupal performance will be done with Drupal core only. The only nonstandard module that has been …

Introduction

  This paper will outline my test environment, software used and procedures for benchmarking and profiling. This process can apply to both scaling up and scaling out architectures. Scaling out will require a slightly different approach due to the fact that the entire webserver suite and/or MySQL will be split across multiple servers. 

Test System

  My test system is an AMD 2100 with 2GB RAM and single PATA harddrive. (Stop laughing.) It has XAMPP 1.6.6 installed which contains Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51a with eAccelerator turned off. Drupal 5.7 and the devel module have been installed. The test Drupal site contains 5000 nodes, with 50,000 comments, 5000 vocabulary and terms with a max length of 12. These first attempts at improving Drupal performance will be done with Drupal core only. The only nonstandard module that has been …

Introduction

Improving Drupal's MySQL performance is more than just optimizing Drupal and MySQL themselves. I wanted to mention that the server hardware, operating system, webserver, and PHP also play important roles in deploying the fastest system possible. Benchmarking and profiling a system is a very methodical step-by-step process starting from the hardware, the operating system, Apache, PHP, MySQL then finally Drupal itself.

Server Hardware

Everything starts at the hardware level and having a way to benchmark CPU, memory, and harddrives is very important. Not all motherboards are created equal either. If at all possible, developing a benchmarking plan to test different CPUs, memory and harddrives will go along way to help creating a high performance Drupal/MySQL system. Using sysbench from http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/, it's possible to show which CPU, …