Sid Sidberry Reads

In case you don’t know I love vps, I also love everything we learn from clouds and clusters, which of course is the whole idea behind the grayNetwork, but that’s another post.

So imagine the delight in finding a project that combines clouds and vpses! Yeaper I was dancing the streets of this avatar chat beta

From: http://vps.net/

This blog is to bring you the latest news and updates on the VPS.net upcoming VPS (Virtual Private Server) Cloud Platform, brought you by the industry leading UK2 Group.

Check It Out:
The Virtual Private Server VPS Cloud | UK / USA

crap demonoid is down again apparently the server was just overloaded

check if its up:
down for everyone or just me

From: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/12/18/xtradb-benchmarks-15x-gain/

I guess it is first reaction on new storage engine – show me benefits. So there is benchmark I made on one our servers. It is Dell 2950 with 8CPU cores and RAID10 on 6 disks with BBU, and 32GB RAM on board with CentOS 5.2 as OS. This is quite typical server we recommend to run MySQL on. What is important I used Noop IO scheduler, instead of default CFQ. Disclaimer: Please note you may not get similar benefits on less powerful servers, as most important fixes in XtraDB are related to multi-core and multi-disks utilization. Also results may be different if load is CPU bound.

Check It Out:
XtraDB benchmarks – 1.5X gain in IO-bound load | MySQL Performance Blog

I’m using vmware 6, so I don’t know if this works in 5 or server editions.

vmware installs a script called vmrun that allows you to perform almost anything you need to do on a vmware machine pragmatically.

sidney@my-host:~> /usr/bin/vmrun
vmrun version 6.0.4 build-93057

Usage: vmrun COMMAND [PARAMETERS]

Authentication flags
-gu
-gp

POWER COMMANDS           PARAMETERS           DESCRIPTION
start                    Path to vmx file     Start a VM or Team
                         or vmtm file
                         [gui|nogui]
stop                     Path to vmx file     Stop a VM or Team
                         or vmtm file
                         [hard|soft]
reset                    Path to vmx file     Reset a VM or Team
                         or vmtm file
                         [hard|soft]
suspend                  Path to vmx file     Suspend a VM or Team
                         or vmtm file
                         [hard|soft]

SNAPSHOT COMMANDS        PARAMETERS           DESCRIPTION
listSnapshots            Path to vmx file     List all snapshots in a VM
snapshot                 Path to vmx file     Create a snapshot of a VM
                         Snapshot name
deleteSnapshot           Path to vmx file     Remove a snapshot from a VM
                         Snapshot name
revertToSnapshot         Path to vmx file     Set VM state to a snapshot
                         Snapshot name

GUEST OS COMMANDS        PARAMETERS           DESCRIPTION
runProgramInGuest        Path to vmx file     Run a program in Guest OS
                         Program
                         [Program arguments]
fileExistsInGuest        Path to vmx file     Check if a file exists in Guest OS
                         Path to file in guest
setSharedFolderState     Path to vmx file     Modify a Host-Guest shared folder
                         Share name
                         New host path
addSharedFolder          Path to vmx file     Add a Host-Guest shared folder
                         Share name
                         Host path
removeSharedFolder       Path to vmx file     Remove a Host-Guest shared folder
                         Share name
listProcessesInGuest     Path to vmx file     List running processes in Guest OS
killProcessInGuest       Path to vmx file     Kill a process in Guest OS
                         process id
runScriptInGuest         Path to vmx file     Run a script in Guest OS
                         Interpreter path
                         script_text
deleteFileInGuest        Path to vmx file     Delete a file in Guest OS
                         File
createDirectoryInGuest   Path to vmx file     Create a directory in Guest OS
                         Directory path
deleteDirectoryInGuest   Path to vmx file     Delete a directory in Guest OS
                         Directory path
listDirectoryInGuest     Path to vmx file     List a directory in Guest OS
                         Directory path
copyFileFromHostToGuest  Path to vmx file     Copy a file from host OS to guest OS
                         Path on host
                         Path in guest
copyFileFromGuestToHost  Path to vmx file     Copy a file from guest OS to host OS
                         Path in guest
                         Path on host
renameFileInGuest        Path to vmx file     Rename a file in Guest OS
                         Original name
                         New name

GENERAL COMMANDS         PARAMETERS           DESCRIPTION
list                                          List all running VMs
upgradevm                Path to vmx file     Upgrade VM file format, virtual hw
installtools             Path to vmx file     Install Tools in Guest OS

Examples:
  vmrun list
  vmrun upgradevm w2k.vmx
  vmrun reset w2k.vmx soft
 

Yippie!

From: http://blog.tigerlogic.com/chunkit/the-evolution-of-search/

A look at the History, Vision, Innovators, and Future of Information Accessibility
1. Foundations

A. The Beginning – In the Pre-WWII era, information sharing was in its relative infancy compared to today. Without the help of more modern electronics, we had reached the upper limit in efficiency of how and where information was stored and shared. The organization and cataloging of information within libraries and archives had been well perfected, but the retrieval and dissemination of that information was being hindered by technology.

B. The Vision – In the burgeoning world of scientific advancement that characterized the United States during and after WWII, astute observers like Vannaver Bush began to realize the need for a better system of information sharing. In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, Bush observed that:

Check It Out:
» The Evolution of Search ChunkIt!: TigerLogic ChunkIt!

Facebook so rocks, they have posted not only their memcached patches, but also explain what they needed to change in linux to properly utilize them. facebook +1, myspace – well they still suck

From: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919

If you’ve read anything about scaling large websites, you’ve probably heard about memcached. memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. Here at Facebook, we’re likely the world’s largest user of memcached. We use memcached to alleviate database load. memcached is already fast, but we need it to be faster and more efficient than most installations. We use more than 800 servers supplying over 28 terabytes of memory to our users. Over the past year as Facebook’s popularity has skyrocketed, we’ve run into a number of scaling issues. This ever increasing demand has required us to make modifications to both our operating system and memcached to achieve the performance that provides the best possible experience for our users.

Check It Out:
Engineering @ Facebook’s Notes

mysqlperformanceblog as a well written post discussing why mysql quality will never be what it once was. I honestly am more attracted to drizzle than mysql these days, but still a good read

I had a call with Monty the other day and I told him why I think MySQL Server Quality will never be the same again. I’ve been thinking a bit more about it and here is the extended list.

In particular I think MySQL Server will never be able to reach its original quality guidelines (see previous post) and even current release criterias will unlikely be ever reached with any sensible definition of what serious bugs are.

7 Reasons why MySQL Quality will never be the same | MySQL Performance Blog

So far the the to biggest hurdles in my understanding of couchdb are mapReduce and how best to use data in it. Thanks to Michael Stillwell mapReduce I finally understand mapReduce.

From: http://www.ibuildings.com/blog/archives/1291-Some-thoughts-on-CouchDB.html

A few weeks ago Jan Lehnardt of CouchDB came by to Ibuildings UK and gave a talk about the project. CouchDB is a database that’s designed to be highly scalable, in terms of, well pretty much everything really: the amount of data it can handle, and the number of CPUs the distributed server can efficiently use in parallel, the number of concurrent clients. (Note though that CouchDB sits at version 0.8.1 at the moment, and many of the scalability features either haven’t been implemented, or haven’t been tested.) What follows is a short description of how CouchDB works, including the unusual MapReduce-powered database query technique, as gleaned from the talk and a few days’ worth of playing with it.

Check It Out:
Ibuildings – Ibuildings blogs > Some thoughts on CouchDB

So now I’m stuck wondering… which db do I use for new backend? I have a few months before its actually used, but I’ve seriously been wanting to try out mysql with a wafflegrid, but couchdb is just awesome…

Maybe I should just do both and hope I can toss two more servers into the mix before it actually launches….

While continuing my trolling for all things couchdb, I came across this tutorial. Christopher Lenz uses a blogging system to explain how a couchdb database could be setup and how to perform a join (or something similar). Better yet the reccomended join method comes from the couchdb creator himself

From: http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins

I’ve been playing more and more with CouchDB lately. After putting together a Python library, I worked on a brand new included HTML/AJAX interface. Now I’m starting to dive into the Erlang code, which is my first serious encounter with Erlang. In particular, I started a branch that aims to replace the HTTP server underpinnings with Bob Ippolito´s not-quite-released-yet Mochiweb library.

Despite all that activity (and past experience with the conceptually similar Lotus Notes), the correct approach to designing applications “the CouchDB way” isn’t always obvious to me at this point. Just today, there was a discussion on IRC how you’d go about modeling a simple blogging system with “post” and “comment” entities, where any blog post might have N comments. If you’d be using an SQL database, you’d obviously have two tables with foreign keys and you’d be using joins. (At least until you needed to add some denormalization.)

But what would the “obvious” approach in CouchDB look like?

Check It Out:
about:cmlenz – CouchDB “Joins”