Seeing my recent love affair with solid state drives I thought I would test drive one of the latest greatest drives out their the 80GB intel x-25m80GB.  Like a child on Christmas morning, I felt true excitement as the generic UPS envelop arrived on my porch today.

While it did not show up until late in the day, I can’t just let it sit their without starting to test it can I?

Benchmarks are running as I write this and I will provide the full breakdown of the drives performance as I finish up the tests.

But to wet your appetite, check this out:

50-50 read/write sysbench test:  1899 IO requests per second!!!  Thats huge!!!

Thats compare to the 284 IOPS I got on the memoright GT, a performance improvement of 6.6x, with a higher capacity 80GB -vs- 32GB, and a Lower cost $773 -vs- $680…  outstanding!!!

Here are the first unverified sysbench test runs:

Few months ago I’ve switched one of our internal projects from doing synchronous database saves of analytics data to an asynchronous processing using starling + a pool of workers. This was the day when I really understood the power of specialized queue servers. I was using database (mostly, MySQL) for this kind of tasks for years and sometimes (especially under a highly concurrent load) it worked not so fast… Few times I worked with some queue servers, but those were either some small tasks or I didn’t have a time to really get the idea, that specialized queue servers were created just to do these tasks quickly and efficiently.

All this time (few months now) I was using starling noticed really bad thing in how it works: if workers die (really die, or lock on something for a long time, or just start lagging) …

Since the day one when I joined Scribd, I was thinking about the fact that 90+% of our traffic is going to the document view pages, which is a single action in our documents controller. I was wondering how could we improve this action responsiveness and make our users happier.

Few times I was creating a git branches and hacking this action trying to implement some sort of page-level caching to make things faster. But all the time results weren’t as good as I’d like them to be. So, branches were sitting there and waiting for a better idea.

Few months ago my good friend has joined Scribd and we’ve started thinking on this problem together. As the result of our brainstorming we’ve managed to figure out what were the problems preventing us from doing efficient caching: …

Network.com setup in Vegas, Thumper disk bay, green by Shawn Ferry

As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to see what the “best case” compression ratio was for our dataset (InnoDB tables)
2. I wanted to see what the “worst case” CPU usage was for our workload
3. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to try something quick & dirty.

I got both those data points with enough granularity to be useful: a 2.12X compression ratio over a …

Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

I presented these at an internal MySQL professional services meeting about a month ago… its mostly a hodge podge of various benchmarks… but enjoy! The big difference in these benchmarks vs the other benchmarks is I am testing on the memoright GT drive, which is supposed to be one of the fastest SLC drives out their currently. Lets get right too it:

Looking at sysbench Random read/write iops:

A lot of my clients are in a position where their database performance is deteriorating but they are not “big enough” (or not willing/able to) explore sharding all of their data structures. They’re too big for the solution to be adding another read slave, but too small to justify the resources for re-designing their [...]

So Yves knowing my affinity for all things solid state forwarded me this link, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html , it seems Linus Torvalds picked up one of the new Intel SSD drives ( if anyone wants to send me one to test that would be cool ).  Whats interesting is he says the thing just rocks.  But how will this perfom in a database environment?  Not 100% sure, but I think it’s going to perform worse then the mtron or memoright drvies I have tested.  Why?  Well the drive is MLC not SLC.  Anandtech has a great review the Intel SSD, with an awesome explination with accompaning benchmarks on SLC -vs- MLC.  Most of these tests are performed in a windows environment, and I …