This year’s Surge conference was a great sophomore event to follow up last year’s inaugural conference. A lot of very smart people were there, and the hallway track was great.

I presented on three things: a lightning talk about causes of MySQL downtime; I chaired a panel on Big Data and the Cloud; and I showed how to derive scalability and performance metrics from TCP traffic. I’ve sent my slides to the Surge organizers, and I understand that they will be posting them as well as integrating them into the video of my session. In the meanwhile you can download my slides from Percona’s presentations page.

Further Reading:

• I’m speaking at Surge 2011
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Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Surge 2011 conference in Baltimore, MD.  I thought it was a great conference, and I’m already looking forward to next year.  I’m sure there’s already a plethora of great blog posts on Surge, but here’s just some thoughts based on my experience.

In no particular order:

EC2 has changed the world, everybody hates EC2

I don’t think I heard a presentation where somebody didn’t use EC2 and the other assorted AWS products.  Amazon (as far as I know) was not represented at the conference, and it seemed awkward for them to not be there (to me, at least).  This …

I’ll be speaking at Surge again this year. This time, unlike last year’s talk, I’m tackling a very concrete topic: extracting scalability and performance metrics from TCP network traffic. It turns out that most things that communicate over TCP can be analyzed very elegantly just by capturing arrival and departure timestamps of packets, nothing more. I’ll show examples where different views on the same data pull out completely different insights about the application, even though we have no information about the application itself (okay, I actually know that it’s a MySQL database, and a lot about the actual database and workload, but I don’t need that in order to do what I’ll show you). It’s an amazingly powerful technique that I continue to find new ways to apply to real systems.

Take a …