Notes from Structure 08, Velocity and Graphing Social Patterns East

I attended several events in June of this year including Graphing Social Patterns East, Velocity and Structure 08. At each of these events, I tried to take some notes and posted them to my personal blog. I received a few pings from readers of this blog to point them to a list of these posts. It took some time but here is the list of my notes. In some cases, I have linked directly to the presentation files.

High-performance Ajax Applications: Julien Lecomte (Yahoo!) talked about how to effectively use AJAX in your applications without compromising performance.
Slideshare: High performance Ajax Applications

Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance: Excellent tips on stress and performance testing by Goranka Bjedov of Google.

Actionable Logging for Smoother Operation and Faster Recovery: Mandi Walls from AOL talked about logging in general including actionable logging, why it's important, logging goals, log file management, things to avoid in logs and more. (Presentation slides)

Clouds are No Substitute for Competence: Presented by Javier Soltero of Hyperic

Energy Efficient Operations: Some Challenges and Opportunities: Luiz Barroso from Google presented this very interesting and informative session about making operations energy efficient.

Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure: John Folwer (Sun Microsystems) was the speaker at this talk about Web 2.0 architectures. (Presentation slides)

Importance of Operations and Performance: Artur Bergman of Wikia talked about lessons learned while running 7000 wikis.

Jiffy: Real World Performance Measurement: In this session Scott Ruthfield talks about Jiffy, an open source tool for performance measurement and instrumentation. (Presentation slides)

KITE: Keynote Internet Testing Environment Launch: KITE was one of the interesting products launched at Velocity. KITE allows you to test from desktop to the Internet cloud. At the time of launch KITE was free. Don't know the current pricing model. (Presentation slides)

Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics: Panelists including Sandy Jen, Akash Garg, Jeremiah Robinson, Jonathan Heiliger and James Barrese discussed strategies and tactics for handling explosive growth.

The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer: At Structure 08, panelists on this session included Mayank Bawa (Aster Data Systems), Doug Judd (Zvents), Luke Lonergan (Greenplum), Damian Black (SQLstream), Dave Schrader (Teradata) and Scott Wiener (Cloud9Analytics). Each panelist provided insight into the ground breaking work their company is doing in solving data processing and handling BI challenges faced by consumers today.

Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs: This panel on cloud computing featured panelists including Geva Perry (GigaSpaces), Jason Hoffman (Joyent), Tony Lucas (XCalibre), Lew Moorman (Rackspace), Christophe Bisciglia (Google / AppEngine) and Joe Weinman (AT&T). Christophe got grilled heavily by other panelists but he handled it pretty darn well.

Werner Vogels: Keynote at Structure 08: Dr. Vogels keynote was one of the highlights of Structure 08. He presented case study of Animoto and talked about the 70/30 switch among other things.

The Platform Revolution: A Look into disruptive technologies: Jonathan Yarmis AMR Research (VP of Disruptive Technologies) talked about technology trends, social networking, mobility, mobile , cloud computing, stream computing, business models, user 2.0 and the new enterprise reality.

Green Data Centers: Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) presented this session. Bill is known for being responsible for the B in BEA. (Presentation slides)

Creating Bebo Applications: Bebo is now part of OpenSocial and this presentation presented at Graphing Social Patterns talks about how to create applications for Bebo.

Open Social and Google App Engine: Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East.

OpenSocial: Open for Business: In this session, panelists were Patrick Chanezon (Google), Paul Lindner (hi5), Max Newbould (MySpace) and Sachin Rekhi (imeem). (Also see)

Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for social networks: One of the best sessions at the Graphing Social Patterns conference presented by Kevin Barenblat and Jeff Ragovin. (Also see)

Mobile Social Networks: A Comparison: Benjamin Joffe's excellent eye opening session for anyone interested in using mobile platform for creating social networking solutions.

Top 5 Things that fail and win on social networks: Dave McClure, chair of Graphing Social Patterns, presented this concise but every effective presentation on what fails and what wins on social networks.

Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization: Dave McClure (500 Hats) moderated this panel which included Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg / KISSmetrics), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.), Albert Lai (Kontagent) and Roy Pereira (Refresh)

Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM & Mobile Devices: Panelists in this session included Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.

Widget Strategies & Social Platforms: Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring Technologies discussed the new role of widgets and how to go about creating them.

Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions: Kent Schoen talked about how to use Facebook for business and marketing.

Developing and Promoting Social Network Applications: Rules of thumb: What does FACEBOOK means when it comes to creating and promoting applications for social networks?

Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers: Ro Choy of Rock You! gave an overview of social networks for business managers:

Scaling MySQL - powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication: Slides from Peter Zaitsev's session at Velocity. (Presentation slides)

Capacity Management: John Allspaw's signature presentation on capacity management. John also has a book coming out on this topic. (Presentation slides)

Structure 08 on demand: Watch the Structure 08 conference on demand at Mogulus.

LinkedIn Communication Architecture: Slides about LinkedIn's platform built in Java. (Presentation slides)

SOX Compliance: A presentation by Skye Rogers. I missed this presentation but then caught up with Skye at dinner. I wish Skye would have received more time to discuss SOX Compliance. (Presentation slides)

There were several sessions I didn't get to go to which is a sad thing. You may want to check the conference websites directly (linked at top of this post) to see if there are presentation slides available. Also, if you took notes at these sessions, please feel free to drop the links as comments to this post.

Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community - Video

The video of one of my three sessions, "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community", presented at MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 has been uploaded by Sheeri. I am very thankful to her for doing all the hard work and making it available.

There are a few slides that were edited out of video because of reasons beyond my control. However, you should still be able to enjoy most of the video.

There is one point related to this video that I would like to make: Based on my particular experience I was leading to believe that Solaris 10 Kernel had the same issue as Linux Kernel related to swappiness and swapping where the kernel will start putting more importance on maintaining file system cache than the mysqld process. However, towards the end of the session, it was pointed out by a Sun engineer (thanks!) that there must be something else going on as UFS on Solaris 10 shouldn't depict this behavior and a process shouldn't swap in favor of maintaining file system cache. I am having this issue on 3 of my servers and I am currently working with Sun engineers to get to the bottom of the issue.

Velocity Conference -- Web Performance and Operations Conference

I just made my reservations to attend Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA. Velocity is a new two day conference being organized by O'Reilly. I was happy to learn at Lunch today that one of my good friends from CafeMom will also be attending. Over at Facebook I see Don McAskill has RSVP'd for the event as well.

Jesse Robbins, chair for Velocity conference graciously provided a 20% discount coupon as a comment on my blog post.

The early registration is about to end, but I find it really interesting that many slots still mention TBC (to be confirmed). I would have expected the schedule to be fully determined by now, however, I still believe this should be a great conference to attend.

Earlier I wrote about my proposed session being rejected at Velocity Conference which was a big disappointment especially since my presentation was about a top 13 website in the world. Wasn't that the point of this conference to begin with? There are several sessions at this conference that have been presented several times at other conferences including MySQL and a little Google search turns up the slides. So some company's 'secret sauce' is worth repeating and others not? Oh well, no hard feelings. As I said, I still think there would be some interesting sessions.

Let me know if you are planning to attend the conference. I will be flying to SFO on Sunday evening and flying back on Wednesday afternoon.

Is Backup Really Irrelevant?

Brian Aker writes in his "PostgreSQL to scale to 1 billion users" post:

Backup is irrelevant for those of you who care about this discussion. LVM/ZFS snapshots are the rule of the land.

While I agree with most of Brian's statements in the article, I respectfully disagree with the statement above, especially the bolded part. Copy-on-write snapshots are EVIL for very large databases operating in a high I/O environment and backup, by no means, is entirely irrelevant. Please correct me if I am wrong but it is my understanding that both LVM and ZFS implement copy-on-write snapshots. Backup may be irrelevant for most sites but not for us.

If, however, by "irrelevant" Brian meant that not important in choosing one database over another, I can agree with that. Why? Because no one benchmarks backup methodologies until backup process starts becoming a major PITA.

Backup methods can be a performance killer when dealing with very large databases. If you're interested in finding out why, and more importantly how, ask me at the conference, come to my scaling MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris session, or check on this blog after the conference.