Mar
23
2010
Ding ding ding.. in this corner, wearing black shorts and a giant schema, we have over 11 million records in MySQL with a complex set of rules governing which must be searchable and which must not be. And in that corner, we have the contender, a kid from the back streets, outweighed and out reached by all his opponents, but still victorious in the queue shootout, with just open source, and 12 patch releases.. written in C, its gearman!

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1 comment | tags: gearman, MySQL, opensource, performance, PHP, Scalability | posted in MySQL, PHP, Scalability
Nov
2
2009
If you’re an engineer, you hate testing. Seriously, who likes doing what those mere mortal “users” do? We’re POWER users and we don’t need to use all those silly features on all those sites. Just look at Craigslist, clearly an engineer’s dream tool.
For web apps, testing actually isn’t *that* hard. The client program (the browser) is readily available on every platform known to man, and they generally don’t do much more than store and retrieve data in clever ways. So, its not like we have to fire up a Large Hadron Collider to observe the effects of our web app. Continue reading
no comments | tags: development, opensource, PHP, selenium, software, testing, web | posted in Engineers, PHP, Scalability
Oct
26
2009
We had a fun time this week with TokyoTyrant. Recently it has become apparent that MemcacheDB has been all but abandoned. As fantastic as the early work was by Steve Chu, the project is in disrepair. That, coupled with the less than obvious failover for its replication combined to make us seek alternatives.

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no comments | tags: berkeleydb, caching, Memcache, memcachedb, PHP, process, RTFM, testing, tokyotyrant | posted in Memcache, PHP