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Using DTrace on MySQL
Even though there aren’t DTrace probes for MySQL released yet, we can still get useful information from MySQL. DTrace has a pid provider which allows us to get into any function the program is executing and see it’s arguments. The only drawback is you have to go digging around in the source code to find…
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Virtualization is more than just consolidation
I was asked to co-present with an engineer from Sun at an upcoming conference in October. I asked him to do his slides and then shoot me over the presentation so I could fill in my half. I noticed that his view of virtualization and mine were very different. To put it into jargon speak,…
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When you’re really pushing traffic, Amazon S3 is more expensive than a CDN
I had largely ignored the Amazon S3 pricing hike or decrease (depending on who you are) which included the addition of a per request charge. It really popped up again when I was recently talking to a new accelerator (just a few) + CDN customer recently. They have about 9 million images taking up ~200 GB of space (average…
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“Is language X scalable? I heard that it isn’t”
A nonsensical question that is rarely qualified. To quote Theo from his fine book Languages aren’t slow; implementations of languages are. and Language selection and scalability have little to do with each other; architectural design and implementation strategy dictate how scalable a final product will be. I couldn’t have put it better myself. The point…
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Just what web server should be sitting in front of my Rails application?
The one you feel comfortable configuring, maintaining and perhaps extending. That one. As web server/reverse proxy schizoserverphrenia tends to sweep through the Rails community from time to time, I see questions of which is “best” so I thought I’d add some numbers here. These are from April-ish 2006, and were in various places on weblog.textdrive.com…
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Why EC2 isn’t yet a platform for “normal” web applications
In a previous article, On Grids, the Ambitions of Amazon and Joyent, I made a few premises: The autoprovisioning and account management (and therefore the accessibility) is the improvement over a service like Sun’s Grid There’s no way that Amazon.com is literally coming off of S3 and EC2 (one datacenter and no CDN abilities? I…
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Getting Started with JRuby
JRuby is something we’re very excited about as it bridges the gap between the Java and Ruby worlds, bringing a wide range of new advantages to developers. You can take advantage of the mature JDBC, utilize Java Application Servers such as Glassfish for deployment with simple WAR’s rather than Capistrano, or use existing JavaBeans and…
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DTrace for Ruby 1.8.6
Earlier this week we released a patch that adds DTrace capability to Ruby 1.8.5. We chose 1.8.5 because it’s what we’ve been using in production, though 1.8.6 is the latest stable release. It now brings me tremendous pleasure to release a patch against Ruby 1.8.6. You’ll find it in the same repository as the other…
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DTrace for Ruby is available
In previous posts we’ve mentioned we’re working on a full Ruby DTrace provider set for Ruby 1.8.5. We’ve finished a solid base set of probes and it is ready for general consumption. The subversion repository is at http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace. The repository contains: The full Ruby 1.8.5 source with DTrace probes (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/ruby-1.8.5) Diffs (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/patches) Binaries (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/binaries/solaris) Examples…
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OK nginx is cool
For the simple reason that it’s the only static web server I’ve seen that supports Solaris’s Event Ports events { worker_connections 1024; use eventport; } I’m cutting over the ton of static servers we have to it. If you’re interested in a x86/64 build for Solaris http://assets1.joyent.com/opt-nginx-amd64-build.tgz http://assets1.joyent.com/opt-pcre7-amd64-build.tgz Just drop it in place $ ln…