Taking the work already done with vmplot.sh, a useful tool for MySQL performance tuning by Yves and Matt at BigDBAHead, and in true Open Source fashion I’ve enhanced and modified for my own purposes.

These changes include:

• Error checking for ‘gnuplot’ command on the system
• Eliminate the first row of sample data, as this is often not a complete sample for the vmstat duration.
• Created a HTML output file for easy browser viewing
• Changed Memory scale values from Kilobytes to Megabytes
• Resizing png’s for optimal 1024×768 display output (2 per row)

Download vmplot

And I get:

So more specifics of what I did.

Install gnuplot.

$ yum install gnuplot

Create vmstat sample …

Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Quietening the patent drums
Cnet’s Ina Fried had the scoop on the news that Microsoft and TomTom had reached a settlement in their patent dispute. The news story was quickly followed by Microsoft’s official statement, as well as a note from the Software Freedom Law Center that the situation is not completely dealt with. Jay Lyman delivered the 451 CAOS …

I don’t know if it is because of my science background, I am a physicist, I do like graphs, especially when I do performance tuning. With UNIX like operating systems, the vmstat command give you an easy way to grab many essential performance counters but, generating graphs from vmstat output with tools like OpenOffice Calc is time consuming and not very efficient. In order to solve this, I wrote a few scripts using gnuplot but they are not very easy to work with. Then, doing some benchmarks with DBT2, I found the vmplot.sh script and… I like that one. I just hacked it little bit to make it keeps the graph on screen, adding the “-persist” parameters to the gnuplot invocations. The script will produce 7 graphs that will be displayed on screen and save in png format in /tmp. The graphs it produces are the following:

• CPU: graphs idle, user, sys and wait time
• …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

Continuing my series of in depth looks at flash appliances, sans, and drives I spent a few weeks test driving the Violin Memory flash ( and DDR based ) solutions. Just from the specs the Violin Memory 1010 is impressive. According to the site the v1010 does 300K random reads per second and 200K random writes and has latency of less then 300 microseconds! That is pretty impressive!  But as I have stated before its difficult to test these limits with our current set of benchmarks.   For my test’s I did run this through the  ysbench fileio tests and dbt2 to get a feel for performance, but I was really eager to test the new juice db benchmark to really drive IO.  For the test Violin generously made available a 4 core (3.4Ghz ) server with 8GB of memory with access to a 360GB DDR based v1010 and then a 320GB DDR based v1010. Unlike the Ramsan I tested a …

2.6.29 was released. I don’t usually write about linux kernel releases, thats what Slashdot is for :), but this one introduces write barriers in LVM, as well as ext4 with write barriers enabled by default. If you run this kernel and forget to turn off barrier support at filesystems (like XFS, nobarrier), you will see nasty performance slowdowns (recent post about it). Beware.

At this year's CeBit 2009 trade fair, there was a dedicated exhibition area called the Open Source Forum. In addition to providing booths for various Open Source projects, they also had a stage for presentations about different topics. Every talk was recorded and available as a live stream during the show.

My dear colleague Simon Phipps spoke about "Adoption-Led: The Third Wave of Open Source" on Wednesday, I gave a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices" on Friday. The recording of these and all other talks as well as the Linux New Media Award ceremony are now available from the archives. Enjoy!

We are proud to announce the release of the first official Beta of MySQL Workbench 5.1, the next highly anticipated version of our database GUI tool - MySQL Workbench. For the first time we are making an announcement for all our major platforms at the same time: OSX, Linux and Windows.

MySQL Workbench 5.1 has some major improvement over our current 5.0 release, many of them might not be that visible when looking at the UI only. We did a major overhaul under the hood in addition to enhance usability and adding some features. On top of it, we moved some features to 5.1 OSS, that were only available in SE edition for 5.0 (like different notation styles i.e.). The editors have been tuned to startup more quickly, and some of them also got face lifted. All Wizards have been revamped using our new mForms library.

Please keep in mind that this is the first beta release of MySQL Workbench 5.1, and it’s not supposed to …