My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.

The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.

For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through …

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

Just a quick note while it is in my head:

When testing software, especially for performance, remember to test on the same hardware you intend to deploy on. One trend I have seen for some time is that testing is often done on whatever happens to be lying around and not otherwise assigned.

While you can certainly test MySQL or an email server on such hardware, you should at least be aware that by providing hardware that does not match what you use in production you will not get an accurate picture, and sometimes the differences can be dramatic. This is especially true of enterprise software with high demands for memory and storage such as databases and MTAs: running such software on an old desktop or five-year-old server will not provide an accurate picture of how the software will perform on a multicore server with several gigabytes of RAM and a RAID array.

My advice is this: if you know you will be deploying the solution …

One week ago today I started work at OmniTI as a sales engineer for their Ecelerity MTA offering.

I’ve met and caught up with a great bunch of coworkers, learned a great deal about the new software I’ll be supporting, and generally had a really good time.

I think it is too early to really draw a comparison with working for MySQL, but it is a nice change of pace to sit in an office for a couple of weeks with the human interaction that goes along with it.

So what is Ecelerity? It’s a high-performance, extensible, clusterable MTA (mail transfer agent). Ecelerity is used by companies that need to send high volumes of mail such as Techtarget with their newsletters and reports. Where Sendmail may typically see 100K emails per hour of throughput, Ecelerity is marketed at one million messages per hour and sees several times that amount in the wild.

I’m in Maryland till Thursday then off to Seattle till Sunday, …