From the category archives:

Capacity Planning

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo 2008

January 3, 2008

I’m gonna give a talk in capacity planning for web operations at the Web 2.0 Expo in April. Wondering if I should submit the same sort of talk for the Velocity conference in June. Don’t want to be redundant or anything.

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Datacenters can suck. Communication can be great.

November 13, 2007

If you consider that you and your users are in some sort of a ‘relationship’, then good communication is pretty important. The Rackspace datacenter outage reminds me yet again that we’re lucky to have a handful of servers in more than one datacenter that can communicate to users in the case where we’ve lost one [...]

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Knowing when you can fail is mandatory.

October 11, 2007

“Do you know when your database layer will fall over and die ? At how many QPS (queries per second) will your application fall prey to slowness, corruption, replication issues, or other sorts of badness ?”
I asked that question of the audience when giving a talk on capacity planning at the MySQL conference last year, [...]

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Procurement is good!

September 23, 2007

No matter what sort of capacity planning tricks you think you have up your sleeve, if it doesn’t involve the procurement process, then you can’t call it planning.
Procurement is the part that happens after you know what kind and how much capacity you need. It’s the part where you, someone in some other group like [...]

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Making a site faster by removing machines

August 20, 2007

(well, not really)
A little while ago, in one of our clusters we replaced a boatload of PowerEdge 1425 webserver-class boxes with a much smaller number of HP DL145 G3 quad-core boxes, getting the same amount of oomph from 1/3 the boxes. Not too bad.

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Y!Photos and the Migrations to Flickr

June 15, 2007

Now that the news of this is out and it’s happening, I can say that planning for it was pretty damn cool. Not just from the capacity and operations standpoint, but watching my codehead coworkers deal with all of the API/background/migration stuff as well.
Excellent.

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Lack of a real Web Operations Conference

June 7, 2007

Was talking with Joyce the other day and we talked about how there’s no real Web Ops conference out there currently. The closest is possibly MySQL Conference or maybe the PHP conferences, where ops/sysadmin types will go and attend the few talks about infrastructure topics, but the main audience seems to be developers.
I could [...]

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