Today, just like many times before, I needed to configure a monitoring server for MySQL using Cacti and awesome Percona Monitoring Templates. The only difference was that this time I wanted to get it to run with 1 min resolution (using ganglia and graphite, both with 10 sec resolution, for all the rest of our monitoring in Swiftype really spoiled me!). And that’s where the usual pain in the ass Cacti configuration gets really amplified by the million things you need to change to make it work. So, this is a short checklist post for those who need to configure a Cacti server with 1 minute resolution and setup Percona Monitoring Plugins on it.

Configuring Cacti for 60-seconds polling

First of all, we need to take a Cacti server, which by default is configured to do polling …

Disclaimer: the information in this post is the author’s personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of his employer.

It was spring 2010 when we decided that even though Softlayer‘s server provisioning system is really great and it takes only a few hours to get a new server when we need it, it is still too long sometimes. We wanted to be able to scale up when needed and do it faster. It was especially critical because we were working hard on bringing up Facebook integration to our site and that project could have dramatically changed our application servers cloud capacity requirements.

What buzzword comes to your mind when we talk about scaling up really fast, sometimes within minutes, not hours or days? Exactly – cloud computing! So, after some initial testing and playing around with Softlayer’s (really young back then) cloud solution …

Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the …

We use nginx and its features a lot in Scribd. Many times in the last year we needed some pretty interesting, but not supported feature – we wanted nginx X-Accel-Redirect functionality to work with remote URLs. Out of the box nginx supports this functionality for local URIs only. In this short post I want to explain how did we make nginx serve remote content via X-Accel-Redirect.

First of all, here is why you may need this feature. Let’s imagine you have a file storage on Amazon S3 where you store tons of content. And you have an application where you have some content downloading functionality that you want to be available for logged-in/paying/premium users and/or you want to keep track of downloads your users perform …

Having a reverse-proxy web cache as one of the major infrastructure elements brings many benefits for large web applications: it reduces your application servers load, reduces average response times on your site, etc. But there is one problem every developer experiences when works with such a cache – cached content invalidation.

It is a complex problem that usually consists of two smaller ones: individual cache elements invalidation (you need to keep an eye on your data changes and invalidate cached pages when related data changes) and full cache purges (sometimes your site layout or page templates change and you need to purge all the cached pages to make sure users will get new visual elements of layout changes). In this post I’d like to look at a few techniques we use at …

This is going to be a really short post, but for someone it could save an hour of life.

So, you’ve nothing to do and you’ve decided to play around with IPv6 or maybe you’re happened to be an administrator of a web service that needs to support IPv6 connectivity and you need to make your nginx server work nicely with this protocol.

First thing you need to do is to enable IPv6 in nginx by recompiling it with --with-ipv6 configure option and reinstalling it. If you use some pre-built package, check if your nginx already has this key enabled by running nginx -V.

The results should have --with-ipv6 option in configure arguments:

After the previous post in this caching related series I’ve received many questions on hardware and software configuration of our servers so in this post I’ll describe our server’s configs and the motivation behind those configs.

Hardware Configuration

Since in our setup Squid server uses one-process model (with an asynchronous requests processing) there was no point in ordering multi-core CPUs for our boxes and since we have a lots of pages on the site and the cache is pretty huge all the servers ended up being highly I/O bound. Considering these facts we’ve decided to use the following hardware specs for the servers:

CPU: One pretty cheap dual-core Intel Xeon 5148 (no need in multiple cores or really high frequencies – even these CPUs have ~1% avg load)
RAM: 8Gb (basically …

One of the things about working with MySQL Community is trying to reach you all. If you are reading this then we have reached you.  Talking about community is frankly about where our community exists, where you chat and feel comfortable. To that end we've created a poll about where you might be intrested in hearing *from* us. Please, do let us know which social network you are interested in here from us!

There is no ulterior motive, the poll is anonymous, but it gives us some crucial information on where you want to interact with us, or where we might begin to ask the questions.

Check out the poll.

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.