Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Random Stan Rogers

    California
    My friends all call you home
    And if you take away another
    I’ll be that much more alone
    — California, Northwest Passage

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  • iTunes and Partially Cached Podcasts

    As I discussed in this post, iTunes 4.9 was starting to cause some serious bandwidth issues for podcasters.
    Geek News Central reports that iTunes appears to be be pulling some podcasts from a centralized cache server. [here]
    This post also states that Apple has not told anyone that this is the case, let alone informing podcasters about the infrastructure they have put in place to distribute this cached content.
    Once again, Apple has wandered into the Web 2.0 arena with pre-Internet marketing ideas. I guess eventually they will learn.
    UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the source of the GNC story was the Dailysonic, which has an extensive technical write-up on what they found. [here]

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  • Homesick for Canada

    It’s been nearly two years since I was home in Victoria.
    It’s been nearly 4 years since I saw Banff, Yoho, and Glacier National Parks.
    I am very homesick today. The US feels less and less like home.
    And looking at the MEC catalogue didn’t help.
    We need to get home. Soon. Permanently.

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  • Canadian History Degree Pays Off

    I got 19/20 on the CBC Canada Day Quiz!
    Have fun!

  • Happy Canada Day

    Happy Canada Day from here at the Consulate in Marlborough, MA!
    Hope you aren’t on a BC Ferry!

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  • Staying with Comcast

    Tried to set up Verizon DSL last night. Didn’t work; rotating IP addresses; a variety of line related issues. Cancelled the service this morning.
    Sorry for any interruptions you may have encountered last night.

  • Random Tom Waits

    Uncle Vernon, Uncle Vernon, independent as a hog on ice
    HeÂ’s a big shot down there at the slaughterhouse
    Plays accordion for Mr. Weiss
    — Cemetary Polka From Rain Dogs

  • Making PHP-to-MySQL Connections Persistent

    I have been seeing these bursts of traffic, mainly from spambot morons, that have suddenly been crushing my server. The main cause: excessive database connections.

    This was quickly remedied today when I changed all of the mysql_connect statements to mysql_pconnect statements. This allows PHP to use an existing connection to the MySQL database to serve requests from the same Apache child process.

    Now the truly geeky among you are going “DOH! Wadda ya mean you were opening a new connection for every request?”. Well, believe it or not, I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that your blog app doesn’t persist database connections. Not a big deal if your database is on the same machine, and you are using local named pipes to make requests. However, if that database is located on another machine, if you do a netstat, you will see a large number of connection on port 3306.

    Persisting database connections is particularly important for large hosted services. A great deal of TCP overhead, and kernel space memory can be saved by simply not letting the Web server saturate the database with individual database connections for every page request.

    Without persistent database connections, eventually the TCP queue will be full of database connections and no one will be able to connect to the server, or they will get a lovely “can’t connect to database error”.

  • Web Performance Implications: Podcasters and iTunes 4.9

    Geek News Central is reporting that their server is getting crushed with all the new iTunes 4.9 users. You had to know this would happen. People have heard the buzz and want to hear what it’s all about.
    From a Web performance perspective, podcasts are hellish: large, uncompressible binary files. At least they are able to come along a single TCP connection. But at 10MB+ per file, iTunes is going to fill a lot of pipes, and max a number of bandwith caps.
    Multicast streaming was supposed to alleviate this issue; podcasting is just going to make Web performance worse…or at least more noisy.
    Now, how will the content distribution networks react? They are likely the only source that can help people relieve their load. The CORAL CDN Project is one source for open-source content distribution.
    All in all, Web 2.0 is shaping up to be a bandwidth hog.

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  • Great Write-Up on my employer

    Some great unsolicited positive feedback on the services my employer provides. [here]
    Would love to answer any questions the author has about some of the inside-the-firewall services we provide.
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