allspaw

Code Swarm for Config Management

October 21, 2008

Gil Raphaelli, one of the guys on our Flickr Ops team, put together a Code Swarm animation for the configuration/deployment management tool we use at Flickr to manage our infrastructure. Myles Grant did this for our bug reporting system as well. Check it out: Our automated config management system is called Gemstone, but conceptually you [...]

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I wrote a book about common sense.

October 6, 2008

Whew. That took longer than I thought. Todd Hoff over at the High Scalability blog has an email interview with me about a book that I wrote, called “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources“. I’m still just happy that I got it done at all, seeing how it was due the same week [...]

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More back-of-envelope-math…

September 18, 2008

Via kottke: some good examples of doing rough math in your head, causing you to guess about assumptions all along the way. IMHO, being able to do this is one of the things that makes a good web ops person. The examples might be “useless”, but the process is invaluable.

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Internet-Scale Efficiency

September 16, 2008

James Hamilton’s excellent LADIS 2008 presentation has lots of great stuff in it about internet scale bits. Cool stats.

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Why we use GraphicsMagick

September 2, 2008

Speed: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/www/BENCHMARKS.html Also, it looks like the GM devs are working on getting OpenMP (parallelism) put into GM processing, which will be a huge boom for multicore boxes. Yay!

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Everything isn’t about the Knuth quote

August 24, 2008

It’s hard to describe how tiring it is to hear someone quote Donald Knuth (or Tony Hoare) in the wrong context. I’m not the only one annoyed by this. In “Structured Programming with go to Statements”, Knuth says: We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root [...]

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Slides from Velocity

June 25, 2008

Here are the slides from my talk at the Velocity Conference.

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Varnish and squid, again

June 24, 2008

Just listened to Artur railing against squid and preaching the virtues of varnish. He quoted what most people quoted, which is how varnish performs serving out of *memory*. It must be nice to have a working set that small. Until someone can show me numbers of disk-intensive (meaning, full caches, LRU eviction churning all the [...]

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This just in: anything having to do with servers is a “cloud”! Yay!

June 19, 2008

From this article on BusinesWeek: In addition, through its Data Center Solutions Group, Dell builds clouds, the large groups of computers whose collective power can be tapped remotely, via the Internet. Customers for DCS-built clouds include Yahoo! (YHOO), Facebook, and Akamai (AKAM) as well as big Chinese Internet companies like Baidu (BIDU), Tudou, Tencent Holdings, [...]

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Four chapters of the new book on RoughCuts…

June 13, 2008

So now there’s chapters 1-4 on Safari RoughCuts. Which means if you don’t mind shelling out the dough, you can take a look at what I’ve been getting up early for every day for the past few months. The working title is “The Art of Capacity Planning” and it’s meant to be a no-nonsense description [...]

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