Month: September 2009

The Rocky Mountain Parks: A Privilege Unappreciated

Ken Burns’ tale of the US National Parks reminds me of a heritage that I have, for most of my life, taken for granted. It was in another country, but it is a heritage that I have assumed will always be there.

I grew up amongst the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. Dead center amongst them you might say. Within two hours drive, there were five spectacular parks – Yoho, Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, Glacier, and Mt. Revelstoke.

All of these parks played a part in my childhood, adolescence, and young adult life. It has been nearly 20 years since I spent any time in these parks, but the experience I had there have shaped how I see the world around me. But only now can I really appreciate what these parks mean to us all, in all places.

The parks are a powerful reminder of the transitory effect that man has. Each of them contains some amount of ruins as a visible reminder of man’s failed attempts to exploit and tame the parks. The carcasses of hotels, remains of viaducts, the skeletons of towns litter these refuges.

A part of that failed heritage is something I carry with me, as I am descended from one of the last group permanent residents of an industrial town in a Canadian National Park, as my grandfather lived for a time in the now abandoned town of Bankhead Alberta. My family took me to this place as a child and told me that ‘Grandpa lived here’, a concept I could not understand, as I was in a National Park, wasn’t I? I had no idea of the conflict over what it meant to be a Canadian National Park at the time, as I saw them as the refuges and preserves they had become.

Growing up surrounded by these special places has left with a certain jaded perspective on beauty in the world. Yosemite does not awe the way it does others, as I was raised surrounded by beauty comparable to Yosemite, and perhaps exceeding it. But now I give my unrestrained thanks to those who made the effort to preserve, protect, and conserve these places.

Within the gently protective walls of the Canadian Mountain Parks, I have seen the sublime and the ridiculous. The commercial and the ethereal. Untouched wilderness and unabashed capitalism. And despite protests on both sides, it is clear that they work together, for without the treasure and largesse of one type of visitor, the other would not have a place to go.

Banff is the greatest eyesore amongst those who see the parks as the preserve of untrammeled wilderness. However, if Banff had not existed, the desire and initiative needed to protect the other four parks would not have gained ground. So a commercial pit keeps the wilderness protected, a balance that we can accept in a day of far greater compromises.

So though the idea of a National Park may have been originated in the US, Canada has done well to develop the idea on its own terms. Only now that I am many thousands of miles removed from them, can I appreciate what they have done to to shape me. These memories leave me breathless in the realization of the great privilege I have taken for granted for all of these years.

Effective Web Performance: The Wrong 80 Percent

Steve Souders is the current king of Web performance gurus. His mantra, which is sound and can be borne out by empirical evidence, is that 80% of performance issues occur between the Web server and the Web browser. He offers a fantastically detailed methodology for approaching these issues. But fixing the 80% of performance issues that occur on the front-end of a Web site doesn’t fix the 80% of the problems that occur in the company that created the Web site. Huh? Well, as Inigo Montoya would say, let me explain.

The front-end of a Web site is the final product of a process, (hopefully) shaped by a vision, developed by a company delivering a service or product. It’s the process, that 80% of Web site development that is not Web site development, that let a Web site with high response times and poor user experience get out the door in the first place.

Shouldn’t the main concern of any organization be to understand why the process for creating, managing, and measuring Web sites is such that after expending substantial effort and treasure to create a Web site, it has to be fixed because of performance issues detected only after the process is complete?

Souders’ 80% will fix the immediate problem, and the Web site will end up being measurably faster in a short period of time. The caveat to the technical fix is that unless you can step back and determine how a Web site that needed to be fixed was released in the first place, there is a strong likelihood that the old habits will appear again.

Yahoo! and Google are organizations that are fanatically focused on performance. So, in some respects, it’s understandable how someone (like Steve Souders) who comes out of a performance culture can see all issues as technical issues. I started out in a technical environment, and when I locked myself in that silo, every Web performance issue had a technical solution.

I’ve talked about culture and web performance before, but the message bears repeating. A web performance problem can be fixed with a technical solution. But patching the hole in the dike doesn’t stop you from eventually having to look at why the dike got a hole in the first place.

Solving performance Web problems starts with not tolerating them in the first place. Focusing on solving the technical 80% of Web performance leaves the other 80% of the problem, the culture and processes that originally created the performance issues, untouched.

GrabPERF – Database Failure

The GrabPERF database server failed sometime early this morning. The hosting facility is working to install a new machine, and then will begin the long process of restoring from backups and memory.
Updates will be posted here.

UPDATE – Sep 4 2009 22:00 GMT: The database listener is up and data is flowing into the database and can be viewed in the GrabPERF interface. However, I have lost all of the management scripts that aggregate and drop data. These will be critical as the new database server has a substantially smaller drive. There is a larger attached drive, and I will try and mount the data there.

It will likely take more time than I have at the moment to maintain and restore GrabPERF to its pre-existing state. You can expect serious outages and changes to the system in the next few weeks.

[Whining removed. Self-inflicted injuries are always the hardest to bear.]

UPDATE – Sep 5 2009 03:30 GMT: The Database is back up, and absorbing data. Attempts to move it to the larger drive on the system failed, so the entire database is running on an 11GB partition. <GULP>.

The two most vital maintenance scripts are also running the way they should be. I had to rewrite those from very old archives.

Status: Good, but not where I would like it. I will work with Technorati to see if there is something that I’m missing in trying to use the larger partition. Likely it comes down to my own lame-o linux admin skillz.

I want to thank the ops team from Technorati for spending time on this today. They did an amazing job of finding a machine for this database to live on in record time.
I have also learned the hard lesson of backups. May I not have to learn it again.

UPDATE – Sep 5 2009 04:00 GMT: Thanks again to Jerry Huff at Technorati. He pointed out that if I use a symbolic link, I can move the db files over to the large partition with no problem. Storage is no longer an issue.

[And, why you ask, is Tara Hunt (@missrogue) on this post. Hey, when I asked Tagaroo for Technorati images, this is what it gave me. It was a bit of a shock after 8 hours of mind-stretching recovery work, but hey, ask and ye shall receive.]

UPDATE – Sep 7 2009 01:00 GMT: Seems that I got myself into trouble by using the default MySQL configuration that came with the CentOS distro. As a result, I ran out of database connections! Something that I have chided others for, I did myself.
The symptom appeared when I reactivated my logging database, which runs against the same MySQL installation, just in a separate database. It started to use up the default pool of connections (100) and the agents couldn’t report in.

This has been resolved and everything is back to normal.

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