Planet MCslp

Applying memcached to increase site performance

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:47:14 +0000

A new article on using memcached, the memory caching tool, to improve website and application performance is now available on IBM developerWorks:

The open source memcached tool is a cache for storing frequently used information to save you from loading (and processing) information from slower sources, such as disks or a database. It can be deployed in a dedicated situation or as a method of using up spare memory in an existing environment. Despite the simplicity of memcached, it is sometimes used incorrectly, or it is used as a solution in the wrong type of environment. Learn when it is best to take advantage of using memcached.

Read Applying memcached to increase site performance

Adding DTrace probes to your applications

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:43:59 +0000

A new article on adding DTrace probes to your application has been published on IBM developerWorks:

DTrace provides a rich environment of probes that can be used to monitor the execution of your system, from the kernel up to your application. You can perform a significant amount of examination without changing your application, but to get detailed statistics, you need to add probes to your application. In this article we will examine how to design the probes, where to add them into your application, the best locations for the probes, and how to effectively build and use the probes that you have added.

Read Adding DTrace probes to your applications

Deploying Gearman across multiple environments

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:40:50 +0000

A new article on using the work distribution tool, Gearman:

The open source Gearman service allows you to easily distribute work to other machines in your network, either because you want to spread the work over a large body of machines or because you want to share the functionality of different languages and environments with each other. In this article, you will look at some typical uses of Gearman and how it can solve a variety of issues and problems in modern applications. You will also learn how Gearman can be combined with other tools, like memcached, to help speed up your application and processing requirements.

I’ve tried to pay particular attention to using it where you might normally use RPC or web services, or when you want to execute large quantities of jobs and spread them over a number of machines or different parameters.

Read it Deploying Gearman across multiple environments

Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:39:36 +0000

A new article on deeper analysis of network packets, is now available on IBM developerWorks:

Whether you are monitoring your network to identify performance issues, debugging an application, or have found an application on your network that you do not recognize, occasionally you need to look deep into the protocols being used on your UNIX® network to understand what they are doing. Some protocols are easy to identify and understand, even when used on non-standard ports. Others need more investigation to understand what they are doing and what information they are exchanging. In this article, we will take a look at techniques for performing detailed analysis of the protocols in use on your UNIX network.

The piece specifically looks at ways of extracting more detailed information from the raw data you see on your network.

Read Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

Twitter Updates for 2010-06-20

Martin MC Brown — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:43:00 +0000

For those not following me elsewhere, Sian has a new space on the MCslp Home blog at http://tinyurl.com/33zjgdc #

Twitter Updates for 2010-06-18

Martin MC Brown — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:43:00 +0000

England would play much much better if they didn’t seem to be afraid of the ball #
Please England try tackling the player with the white thing at their feet #football #

Twitter Updates for 2010-05-29

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:43:00 +0000

#eurovision spain: Leo Sayer (1970) Leo Sayer (1980) on backing vocals? #fb #

Twitter Updates for 2010-02-20

Martin MC Brown — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:43:00 +0000

My father acting out an object while playing Cranium - but what is it ? http://tinyurl.com/yfqjddu #fb #

Twitter Updates for 2010-02-05

Martin MC Brown — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:43:00 +0000

Ugly Furniture http://tinyurl.com/ykwtd46 #fb #

Reorganizing the documentation

Martin MC Brown — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:26:56 +0000

Those of you that know the documentation well will be aware of the old page we used to have for the MySQL documentation. It was huge, and over the years we’d done a number of things to try and improve the layout and make it easier to find what you wanted. We had in-age links to jump to the different documentation types, and the old topic table that allowed you to jump to specific parts of the documentation.

The problem was that the more documentation that we produced (and there are over a thousand docs in various formats now), the bigger the page got. When we added the individual topic guides, for example, we trebled the size of the page by adding the links for each individual topic guide.

Ultimately that makes it increasingly difficult for you guys to find what you are looking for, despite the quick links and other elements.

We’ve now changed all this and split the single, big, monolithic page of *every* piece of documentation that we create, and instead spread the documentation out over a number of pages. The actual documentation itself remains the same, and we still have the same range of documentation (in fact, it’s increased slightly as I’ve been able to squeeze in a few more formats and topic guide docs), but everything is still there.

The key is the new sub-navigation bar that the Web team have provided us with:

The pages have been split out as follows:

MySQL Manual — the full, complete reference manuals
Workbench — the Workbench manuals
Expert Guides — the standalone guides for some of our more detailed products and system such as the Falcon storage engine and the MySQL Test Framework
Topic Guides — the topic reference, with the topic table at the top providing direct links into the 5.1 manual or standalone guides, and the full list of downloadable standalone guides.
MySQL Cluster — the full cluster manuals, including the guide to the MySQL Cluster API (NDBAPI)
Other docs — other documentation, not already mentioned, including the sample databases (Sakila, World, Employee), the help tables you can import into MySQL, and printed material and links elsewhere.
MySQL Uni — a page about the MySQL University, which is run by the documentation team, and which provides links to the MySQL Uni pages on Forge
About — information about the documentation team, who we are, and some statistics on the documentation we produce
Archives — archives of older manuals

We are aware of a few issues with some of the links to some documentation, and I’m working right now to address those problems, but all the documentation should be there and available. If it isn’t, please report a Bug.