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, …

Apparently, all the work we have put into dealnews.com over the last 11 1/2 years can be had for $250 and can be delivered in 10 hours.

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-Joomla/Clone-dealnews-com-CMS.html

I see it was canceled.  That is smart.  What we do can not be done for that kind of money.  $350?  Maybe. =)

Speaking of dealnews, we have been rated the #1 Black Friday site by PC Magazine.

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion....

So, my wife told me that my site design was boring.  Yeah, she was right.  I am no designer.  I just don't have that gene.  But, during my work on Wordcraft, I came across some cool places to find designs that are relased under Open Source licenses.

• Open Designs - This is arguably the the prettiest of the three. The search, however, is painfully slow because all results return on one page.  I guess if you can wait, this is a plus as browsing is easier.  Also, you can pick multiple colors and choose by license.  They only list XHTML templates (at least as search options).  That could be a turn off if you like HTML 4 like me.
• Open Web Design - The site itself could use a design overhaul.  But, the content is good.  The search lets …

What would you like to see in a free enterprise-grade monitoring system for your daily MySQL needs?I’m rewriting Monolith - MySQL DBA Console from the ground up. This will be version 2 and I would like to get some input from the global MySQL community.So far I am going with the following; comment with any improvements/additions.

• Variable interval polling of server statistics
• Over 50 different alerts (see list below)
• Graphing of various server statistics (see list below)
• Tuning recommendations with cnf file changes to apply to server
• Change control documents for recommended performance/security tuning
• Threshold based alerting with multiple alert groups: info,warn,critical
• Sorting/ordering of servers via groups. ie: client -> dev,stage,prod
• RSS feeds for each alert group
• XML export with user defined fields for external applications …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

Well, I blogged about Wordcraft the other day.  I have just been running live on the software for 4 days now.  Well, that post had no URI associated with it.  It took me two days to figure this out.  Oops.  Welcome to eating my own dog food.  So, running this live with actual users (and a host of bot spam attempts) I am learning a lot and making a lot of commits.  So, I may very well roll once or twice a week for the first few weeks.

So, with that, I have packaged 0.5.  There are 15 changes in this package.  Some features, but mostly bug fixes.  So, if you could use a simple blog, give it a try and help me debug it.  If you do, please use the Google Code …

It’s interesting that if you read through the Zend dB manual, they mention a big problem with Zend Framework, namely that since Zend uses prepared statements, if you’re running a pre-5.1.17 version of MySQL, you give up the benefits of … Continue reading →

So I was bored earlier and decided to add a headline section to RelationalNews.com - the news site I’ve been working on for relational database management news feeds. It updates automatically based on the number of times an article has been clicked, very simple statistics tracking, and it gets the job done. Also, I increased the number of front page articles to 50.  Enjoy: http://relationalnews.com

So, a while back, not sure when, I was listening to the P3 Podcast and Paul mentioned his dislike for Wordpress.  He said he wished there was a simple blogging application.  I am probably misquoting him horribly.  It was an idea that I had been tinkering with.  So, I started on Wordcraft in my spare time.  Like super spare time.  That time between the kids going to bed and me falling  asleep.  So, it took a while to get it to a usable state.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging.  It works quite well.  You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need.  My wife uses Blogger for our family blog.  It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways.  But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice.

So, why would I want to reinvent the …