Narayan Newton

Multiple Instances

We at Tag1 have used the Cacti Memcache templates many times. ( http://dealnews.com/developers/cacti/memcached.html ) They have become a staple for us and many others. However, we and one of our clients have had issues making them work for monitoring multiple Memcache instances (running on different ports) on the same host. It is possible to make this work with the vanilla templates, but it is a bit difficult. Because of this, we have created a re-roll...

Narayan Newton

New Toolset Addition

There are some standard tools in every MySQL DBA's back pocket, these include maatkit, mysqlreport and mysqlsla. I have a new addition to this: statpack ( http://www.markleith.co.uk/?p=21 ) Some sample output from a statpack run below, its basically mysqlreport on steroids: Uptime: 13 days 19 hours 38 mins Snapshot Period 1: 1 minute interval Variable Delta/Percentage Per Second Total Database Activity Threads Connected: -3 7 Threads Running: 1 3 Questions: 16225 270.42 474675563 Bytes Recieved...

Narayan Newton

Sharing Webroots

There are few options for sharing webroots among multiple webnodes. This is especially true for Drupal, which has a files directory that could be constantly diverging on each webnode. Usually people decide to go with NFSv3. This is what we do on drupal.org and most of my clients do at Tag1. Sadly, this is not really a decision on merit, but on a lack of other options. NFSv3 is pretty much like communicating with two...

Narayan Newton

Tips & Tricks

I've had the opportunity in the last few days to use quite a few cool little utilities that made my life considerably easier. I've known about most of them for awhile, but discovered some new tools or new uses for old tools and wanted to share two of them. AutoSSH SSH tunneling is a way of life. I can't count how many times I've had to throw one into place because "there was no other...

Narayan Newton

Be Paged Before Downtime

I recently joined Tag1 Consulting full time. My main project since I joined was building up our monitoring infrastructure. My personal goal being world domination, but first the best monitoring system I can build. Baby steps...baby steps. For quite awhile now, I've used the monitoring system we built at the Open Source Lab to detect and diagnose problems with drupal.org, apache.org, kerneltrap.org and many more Free Software projects hosted at the lab. These experiences convinced...

Narayan Newton

Tips & Tricks

Until recently, I was a student employee at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. My career there ended, like many, with that painful process known as graduation. I got invaluable experience at the lab, not the least of which being the knowledge gained as their main (only) database administrator. One of my great pleasures in that position, was learning how to configure MySQL replication and manage clusters of replicating database servers. Even the simple...

Jeremy Andrews

Drupal Performance and Scalability

I have completed a rough draft of the first chapter of " Drupal Performance and Scalability ". The first chapter of this online book is divided into four sections, the first of which focuses on the importance of fully defining your performance and scalability goals, helping you to identify what you need to accomplish and how to set concrete and attainable goals. The second section discusses monitoring and measuring your ongoing progress, helping you decide...

Jeremy Andrews

Giving Back

Tag1 Consulting is focused on improving Drupal's performance and scalability. We also believe that when information is freely shared, everyone wins. Toward these ends, we are working on an online book titled, " Drupal Performance and Scalability ". The book is divided into five main sections, Drupal Performance , Front End Performance , Improved Caching and Searching , Optimizing the Database Layer , and Drupal In The Cloud . The book is primarily aimed toward...

Jeremy Andrews

Benchmarking Search

SearchBench has received a couple of useful updates since yesterday's initial cloud tests. It can generate search queries based on actual content, and it can export search benchmark results. In gaining these features, it is now possible to use SearchBench to perform some actual performance comparisons. Once again I set up these tests on an extra large EC2 instance. I still have not performed any tuning, and I continue to test Drupal 5 core search...

Jeremy Andrews

Benchmarking Search

I ran some initial Drupal search benchmarks with SearchBench on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. These first tests were primarily focused on confirming that SearchBench and EC2 are a good match. They utilized a single server instance, and did not include any server tuning. I used the devel module to create 5,000 random nodes and 10,000 random comments. I indexed this content both with Drupal's core search module, and with the contributed Xapian module. I then...