Some news about a change in my career path that I've been meaning to announce. I now have moved on from Lycos and now work for NorthScale Inc!

In parting Lycos, I'd like to thank them for the great challenges I had while there. I designed and developed, along with my team members in the web publishing and support from the OPs group, PHP offerings for Tripod users, a long-awaited feature that premium users can use to install numerous PHP applications. Also, with that was a great interface I developed for installing applications. It required some work on the applications themselves to make them as easy to install as possible (similar to APS). The other task while there was to switch Tripod and Angelfire blogs from Oracle to MySQL. Thank you Lycos -- It was a pleasure working with all of you!

Now, I'm excited to announce I'm working with NorthScale. This is a great team of people -- including Dustin Sallings, Steve Yen, …

I'm pleased to announce the release of the Memcached Functions for MySQL, version 1.0.

This release contains several changes, per the ChangeLog:

1.0 Thursday, July 30, 2009 12:00:00 EST 2009
* Fixed issue of setting NULLs with user-defined variables (Thanks to
Jean-Jacques Moortgat at aol dot com !)
* Fixed issue of obtaining a NULL value FROM memcached
* All set functions now return 0 (failure) or 1 (success)
* Other cleanups
* More tests

Importantly, there was an issue that I blogged about several days ago where in the UDF API, if you pass a user-defined variable that is set to NULL to memc_set(), the length of the argument is 8192 even though the value of the argument itself is NULL, which caused much unhappiness in MySQL (crash). That is fixed by setting the length to 0 if the argument itself is NULL. Also fixed is obtaining the NULL value from memcached using …

Sun's LAMP support is assembled from two pieces: the L is from our Linux/GNU Support (see SunSolve entry), while the AMP comes from the GlassFish WebStack, which, in its latest incarnation includes Apache HTTP Server, lighttpd, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Python, Ruby, Squid, Tomcat, GlassFish (v2.1) and Hudson (features).

The inclusion of Hudson is a bit of an opportunistic move (more on that in a bit), the rest comprises a well tested, integrated, …

Intuit launches open source project. SFLC on Microsoft GPL violation accusations.

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

# Intuit launched open source projects and community to develop apps based on its Intuit Partner Platform, while Savio Rodrigues declared Intuit’s open source play is all business.

# SFLC’s Bradley Kuhn told SDTimes Microsoft was in violation of the GPL.

# MySQL and Memcached-based appliance vendor Schooner Info Tech has raised $20m in Series B funding.

# …

Hi all,

This is a quick post to let you know that the memcached functions for MySQL have been moved to Launchpad. The project page is: https://launchpad.net/memcached-udfs

I think this will help to get the project more exposure, as well as making it easier for people to contribute to the project. I've found Launchpad to be quite useful for managing projects and so decided to move the UDFs there.

I'm working on getting out another version soon. I just fixed a bug the deals with user-defined variables that were set to NULL causing the UDFs to crash the server. It was a bug in the length of the argument being set to 8192


For instance, the first explicitly:

mysql> select memc_set('nullval', null);

(gdb) p args->args[1]
$3 = 0x0
(gdb) p args->lengths[1]
$4 = …

Ryan posted an article on the MySQL Performance Blog about how to use mk-query-digest to analyze and understand your memcached usage with the same techniques you use for MySQL query analysis. This is an idea that came to me during the 2009 MySQL Conference, while talking to our friends from Schooner, who sell a memcached appliance.

It suddenly struck me that the science of memcached performance is basically nonexistent, from the standpoint of developers and architects. Everyone treats it as a magical tool that just performs well and doesn’t need to be analyzed, which is demonstrably and self-evidently false. memcached itself is very fast, true, so it doesn’t usually become a performance bottleneck the way a database server does. But that’s not the point. There is a …

Have you ever wondered how optimized your Memcached installation is? There is a common misconception that one doesn't have to think too deeply about Memcached performance, but that is not true. If your setup is inefficient, you could:

• Burn Memory
• Waste Network Round-Trips
• Store Keys That Never Get Retrieved
• Have a Low Cache Hit Ratio (i.e. query MySQL too much)
• Suffer a fate too horrible to contemplate.

Percona does a lot of consulting around Memcached, so we try to take a quantitative, scientific approach to measuring memcached performance, just like everything else we do.

memcached is basically a key-value in-memory database, so it works well to analyze its traffic with Maatkit's mk-query-digest tool. You can now use …

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

I discovered while compiling Wafflegrid today that by default, the Ubuntu binaries for memcached are not-multithreaded.

Following the installation of memcached from apt-get and libmemcached I ran memslap for:

$ memslap -s localhost
    Threads connecting to servers 1
    Took 1.633 seconds to load data

$ memstat -s localhost
Listing 1 Server

Server: localhost (11211)
     pid: 23868
     uptime: 54
     time: 1244575816
     version: 1.2.2
     pointer_size: 32
     rusage_user: 0.90000
     rusage_system: 0.120000
     curr_items: 10000
     total_items: 10000
     bytes: 5430000
     curr_connections: 1
     total_connections: 3
     connection_structures: 2
     cmd_get: 0
     cmd_set: 10000
     get_hits: 0
     get_misses: 0 …