planet.grep.be today has a lot of active open source users and contributors.
The weird thing is that we never meet apart from Fosdem.
Yes, we occasionally run into eachother at other events but there's not enough beer involved.

I've had different people ask me what and where are the Open Source gatherings in Belgium, and we must admit that apart
from Fosdem there isn't that much in our little country.

There were a couple of MySQL User Group events, some Drupal ones, some LUG had meetings altough I have the idea most of them have dried out :(

So I have this crazy idea of inviting you all to grab a beer, maybe even free beer :) on december 29 some in a pub in Antwerp

I`m open for suggestions on good locations.

Oh and everybody is welcome, both readers and writers :)

PS. Yes I know that some of you will be drinking in Berlin at …

and probably my last one ..

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was looking into a way of converting my static page with published papers, articles and presentations in a more dynamic page where I could create RSS feeds from the updates and feed them into another site for everybody to use.

Some people suggested that I'd have a look at CCK & Views for this. While up till now when creating an app I had usually written my own Drupal module with my own database schema and manually written SQL Queries. This indeed looked like the perfect opportunity to dig into the CCK and Views thingie.

Now I must admit that I`m not really fond of "generated queries"

I've had nightmares before when having …

Have to close some tabs .. what more can I say ..

2 interresting articles about Drupal and MySQL performance tuning

here and here

Enjoy

I'm not planning on a Part IV! :) I wrote these articles last summer and decided to post them to the blog so they didn't get lost.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

I'm not planning on a Part IV! :) I wrote these articles last summer and decided to post them to the blog so they didn't get lost.MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Introduction

Using the tools and techniques from Part II, we'll look at the areas of Drupal that can be improved. We'll go over queries, indexes and mysql configuration. This will be based upon loading the home page only.

Initial Load

Looking at a single loading of the home page produces a total of 122 SELECT queries, 3 SET commands, and 2 UPDATES. Only 30 SELECTS are unique, so there's plenty of duplicated queries. The slow query log contains 5 queries when the system is loaded with 10 concurrent connections for a 30 second period. The queries in the slow query log could also be queries that are not using indexes. We'll start with these queries first.

Slow Query Log

mysql» SELECT name, filename, throttle FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 ORDER BY weight ASC, filename ASC;
…

Introduction

Using the tools and techniques from Part II, we'll look at the areas of Drupal that can be improved. We'll go over queries, indexes and mysql configuration. This will be based upon loading the home page only.

Initial Load

Looking at a single loading of the home page produces a total of 122 SELECT queries, 3 SET commands, and 2 UPDATES. Only 30 SELECTS are unique, so there's plenty of duplicated queries. The slow query log contains 5 queries when the system is loaded with 10 concurrent connections for a 30 second period. The queries in the slow query log could also be queries that are not using indexes. We'll start with these queries first.

Slow Query Log

mysql» SELECT name, filename, throttle FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 ORDER BY weight ASC, filename ASC;
…

Introduction

  This paper will outline my test environment, software used and procedures for benchmarking and profiling. This process can apply to both scaling up and scaling out architectures. Scaling out will require a slightly different approach due to the fact that the entire webserver suite and/or MySQL will be split across multiple servers. 

Test System

  My test system is an AMD 2100 with 2GB RAM and single PATA harddrive. (Stop laughing.) It has XAMPP 1.6.6 installed which contains Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51a with eAccelerator turned off. Drupal 5.7 and the devel module have been installed. The test Drupal site contains 5000 nodes, with 50,000 comments, 5000 vocabulary and terms with a max length of 12. These first attempts at improving Drupal performance will be done with Drupal core only. The only nonstandard module that has been …

Introduction

  This paper will outline my test environment, software used and procedures for benchmarking and profiling. This process can apply to both scaling up and scaling out architectures. Scaling out will require a slightly different approach due to the fact that the entire webserver suite and/or MySQL will be split across multiple servers. 

Test System

  My test system is an AMD 2100 with 2GB RAM and single PATA harddrive. (Stop laughing.) It has XAMPP 1.6.6 installed which contains Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51a with eAccelerator turned off. Drupal 5.7 and the devel module have been installed. The test Drupal site contains 5000 nodes, with 50,000 comments, 5000 vocabulary and terms with a max length of 12. These first attempts at improving Drupal performance will be done with Drupal core only. The only nonstandard module that has been …

Introduction

Improving Drupal's MySQL performance is more than just optimizing Drupal and MySQL themselves. I wanted to mention that the server hardware, operating system, webserver, and PHP also play important roles in deploying the fastest system possible. Benchmarking and profiling a system is a very methodical step-by-step process starting from the hardware, the operating system, Apache, PHP, MySQL then finally Drupal itself.

Server Hardware

Everything starts at the hardware level and having a way to benchmark CPU, memory, and harddrives is very important. Not all motherboards are created equal either. If at all possible, developing a benchmarking plan to test different CPUs, memory and harddrives will go along way to help creating a high performance Drupal/MySQL system. Using sysbench from http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/, it's possible to show which CPU, …