Once upon a time CPU utilization was quite a useful metric. Following are the output of several tools that provide CPU utilization metrics:

top

top reports a load of 1.66.

Is this correct? No. The correct load number is probably closer to 2.4.

# top -b -n 1| head -20
top - 11:27:45 up 151 days,  1:55,  7 users,  load average: 1.66, 1.84, 1.88
Tasks: 389 total,   3 running, 386 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us, 20.6%sy,  1.2%ni, 77.3%id,  0.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  32639636k total, 32206476k used,   433160k free,   235732k buffers
Swap: 16359420k total, 10285664k used,  6073756k free,  2354840k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
16702 root      20   0 8274m 5.0g 5.0g S 85.1 16.1  59164:55 VirtualBox
 4657 root      20   0  9.8g 5.2g 5.1g S 45.5 16.6  26518:13 VirtualBox
 6239 root      20   0  9.8g 5.1g 5.1g S 39.6 16.5  31200:52 VirtualBox
27070 root …

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/2/9/534

Building on the original kSplice idea and combining the efforts of the work done at Red Hat and SuSE, common infrastructure is now ready to be put into the Linux 3.20 mainline kernel – Red Hat and SuSE have already committed to using this.

I still reckon it’s freaky trickery, but heck – it works, and it’s great for server environments that have no redundancy (I prefer to fix that issue!) and can’t afford any downtime.

Read the original article at 10 reaons active-active is hard and how to solve it

Multi-master replication provides redundant copies of your most important business assets. What’s more it allows applications to scale out, which is perfect for cloud hosting solutions like Amazon Web Services. But when you decide you need to scale your write capacity, you may be considering active-active setup. This is dangerous, messy and prone to failure. [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

Related posts:

1. Why does MySQL replication fail?
2. …

Oracle's MySQL Enterprise Edition includes the most comprehensive set of advanced features, management tools and technical support to help you reduce the cost, risk & time to deploy and manage your MySQL applications.

Access our Resource Kit to discover:

• How to boost scalability by 20x with MySQL Enterprise Scalability
• How to automatically detect and recover from failures with MySQL Enterprise High Availability
• How to eliminate security vulnerabilities, improve replication and optimize performance with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor
• How MySQL Enterprise Backup reduces the risk of data loss …

We make a lot of posts that give IT tips and advice, as well as recommendations on how to use Monitis, so here is a summary of the posts for this week in case you missed them.

Monitoring IIS With VBScript via Monitis; It’s so Easy!

This post demonstrates how to monitor an IIS using Monitis Custom Monitors and VBscript. You can use the Monitis API to monitor your own custom metrics. This is very powerful because it lets you monitor any IIS metrics you like, set thresholds and receive notifications.

Top 4 Software Based IIS Server Performance Tips

These 4 …

Multi-master MySQL, with the MMM management software brings a whole host of new features, and manageability to your MySQL deployments.   Run backups, alter tables, perform upgrades all without slowing down your production users.

Read more at Database Journal – Using Multi-master MySQL To Get A Leg Up On Database Performance

We just had a booboo in one of our internal systems, causing it to not come up properly on reboot. The actual mishap occurred several weeks ago (simple case of human error) and was in itself a valid change so monitoring didn’t raise any concerns. So, as always, it’s interesting and useful to think about such events and see what we can learn.

Years ago, but for some now still, one objective is to see long uptime for a server, sometimes years. It means the sysadmin is doing everything right, and thus some serious pride is attached to this number. As described only last week in Modern Uptime on the Standalone Sysadmin blog, security patches are a serious issue these days, and so (except if you’re using ksplice sysadmin quality has become more a question of when you …

Last night my residential area lost power for about 2 hours, between 2-4 am. This reminded me of something, and there’s analogies to MySQL infrastructure. Power companies have over recent years invested a lot of money in making the supply more reliable. But, it does fail occasionally still.

From my perspective, the question becomes: is it worth the additional investment for the power companies? Those extra few decimal points in reliability come at a very high cost, and still things can go wrong. So a household (or business) that relies on continuity has to put other measures in place anyway. If the power company has an obligation to deliver to certain standards, it might be more economical for them to provide suitable equipment (UPS, small generator) to these households and business (for free!) and the resulting setup would provide actual continuity rather than merely higher reliability with occasional failures. Everybody …