A site called “PlentyOfFish.com” is currently getting 30 million hits a day. The number doesn’t blow me off. However, what surprise me is that this site is basically operated by single man “Markus Frind”. How does he achieved that? If you want to hear how he does that, you can go to his interview from [...]

Continue reading " Plenty of Fish - Cash cow! "

When we talk about SOA, I would think of Amazon. It is the company that takes SOA to the next level, proving to the world that it is a viable solution for us. Great! I decide to put sometime to learn from Amazon via reviewing the web services it provides, reading the related interviews [...]

Continue reading " Amazon Web Service Solutions "

Introduction of Solr
Solr is a standalone enterprise search server with a web-services like API. You put documents in it (called "indexing") via XML over HTTP (RESTful). You query it via HTTP GET and receive XML results.

Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic
Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML and HTTP
Comprehensive HTML Administration Interfaces
Scalability [...]

Continue reading " Powerful Full Text Search - Part 3 Solr "

Introduction from Cameron Purdy
 

Continue reading " Grid Computing - Part 1 Introduction "

Most companies I have worked for use Tomcat as Servlet Container. It is de facto standard just like how Apache been used as Web Server. However, most of us just drag our war file to the webapp folder and use Tomcat with all the settings as default out of the box. It works fine in [...]

Continue reading " Tomcat Performance Tuning "

Steps to use EC2

To get you start, read here.
Create a custom AMI

How others use it

How SmugMug uses Amazon solution
http://www.rajiv.com/blog/2008/02/04/amazon-ec2/

Continue reading " Scale your site via Amazon solution - EC2 and S3 "

Query Processing Basic
Before tuning your slow query, you better understand how your database process your query first. Here are the steps:

Look up the query cache to see whether the resultset of your query is available. MySQL does this via hashing your query and use the hashed value to check for the results in the [...]

Continue reading " SQL Tuning "

Need of Indexes
Image of you have a table of user info, if the table contains 50 million of rows. Without index, running a query like below will need a full table scan. Clearly it is not efficient as it is O(n) problem.
SELECT * FROM user_info WHERE last_name = “Tom”
But if we index it on [...]

Continue reading " Art of using database indexes "

Before you start tuning your server for mysql performance, you need to obtain the system information first. To do that, there are some linux command that may be useful.
top command

How to interpret the output from top command? Here you go.

The first line is telling you that the system is up 211 days 9 hr and [...]

Continue reading " Server Performance Tuning - MySQL "

How to start our Architectural Review  
We can review our architecture in 3 different aspects to evaluate its scalability and performance.

Deployment and infrastructure
Technology Stacks
Performance and Scalability Frame

Deployment and Infrastructure

Do you need a distributed architecture? If not, you better co-locate web and app server to eliminate the overhead via remote communications (ie. serialization cost and network latency). If [...]

Continue reading " Architectural Review - Scalability and Performance "