Improving the performance of a web system involves knowledge of how the entire technology stack operates and interacts. There are many simple and common tips that can provide immediate improvements for a website. Some examples include:

• Using a CDN for assets
• Compressing content
• Making fewer requests (web, cache, database)
• Asynchronous management
• Optimizing your SQL statements
• Have more memory
• Using SSD’s for database servers
• Updating your software versions
• Adding more servers
• Configuring your software correctly
• … And the general checklist goes on

Understanding where to invest your energy first, knowing what the return on investment can be, and most importantly the measurement and verification of every change made is the difference between blind trial and error and a solid plan and process. …

My recent poll What alert monitoring do you use? showed 25% of the 58 respondents to bravely state they had no MySQL monitoring. I see 1 in 3, ~33% in my consulting so this is consistent.

There is no excuse to not have some MySQL Monitoring on your production system. At the worse case, you should be logging important MySQL information for later analysis. I use my own Logging and Analyzing scripts on every client for an immediate assessment regardless of what’s available. I combine that with my modified statpack to give me immediate text based analysis, broken down by hour chunks for quick reference. These help me in troubleshooting, but they are …

I recent visit with old Brisbane friend HiTCHO which I met at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group in 2005, has lead to this cool list of some hardware and software technologies he used that I am now considering or have already implemented or purchased.

Software

1. xmarks.com - Bookmark-Powered Web Discovery
2. Pulse - Smart Pen
3. Quicksilver Mac windows manager
4. MailPlane - Brings Gmail to your Mac desktop
5. Evernote - Remember Everything, with Firefox plugin and iPhone App
6. …

The 2009 MySQL Conference has closed it’s submissions for papers. This year the motto is “Innovation Everywhere”.

Last weekend’s Open SQL Camp in Charlottesville, Virginia, we had the chance to talk about the movements in the MySQL ecosystem. I was impressed to get the details of the Percona MySQL Patches, but focus is still in 5.0. (Welcome to the Percona team Tom Basil) Our Delta is attempting now to integrate patches into various MySQL branches. There was an opening keynote by Brian Aker from Drizzle, and Drizzle team Jay Pipes and Stewart Smith on hand. It was also announced that MySQL 5.1.30 will be GA, available in early December.

But these …

The current US financial situation has claimed a victim in the Web 2.0 world — Uber. I’m not sure if this is the first significant name, but it will not be the last site running MySQL where investors will be quick to cut losses and move on.

I’ve noticed a change of buttons lately on sites where you can bookmark/share the relevant information. So I’ve done a cross sample of A Computer Site - www.dell.com, The MySQL Acquirer - www.sun.com, A News site - www.cnn.com and a technology information site - www.techcrunch.com

What got me to go back and research is I’d never seen a FaceBook icon before, or perhaps I’d never paid enough attention.

At the end most sites now wash out to a site called Add This.

Announced at the 2007 Conference as MySQL Applications of the Year - #1 in 3G Mobile Entertainment, Amp’d Mobile is no longer the poster boy.

Amp?d Mobile Implodes: Burns $360 million, Declares Bankruptcy. Wow, that’s news on a Sunday.

As I write this blog I have over 90 draft blog posts. That’s 9-0. Why do I have so many posts? The main reason is I want to say something, and I’ve either not completed it, or researched it sufficiently to consider the entry complete.

This frustrates me as sometimes I just want to get the word out on something, or of my opinion, or of something great I’ve discovered. I do it for me, I don’t really care if anybody actually reads my stuff, but I’m surprised sometimes when I get comments how people actually get to see my blog.

JotThat is a surprisingly simple yet brilliant idea. It’s quite simply a site for making Jots, making quick notes, making a passing comment, noting a thought, something you want to either remember or something you want to say in a simple Jot form.

What makes JotThat in my eyes? Well it’s simple, …

WebSite: www.cacti.net

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating …

WebSite: www.mysql.com

The world’s most popular open source database.