Kitchen Soap

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

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Thanks to Mark, squid’s got a patch I’ve been wanting for a gazillion years: time-to-serve statistics that don’t include the client’s location
http://www.squid-cache.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2345
Normally, squid’s kept statistics that included the “time” to serve an object, whether it be a HIT, MISS, NEAR HIT, etc. The clock starts for this time when the first headers are received by [...]

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After seeing Jesse’s great post on Radar (never knew about FreeConferenceCall, very cool!) about the quick and easy webops event communications, I thought I might put a post together on some of what we’re using at Flickr to keep track of things ops-related.
Production Changes/Immediate Issues
We have our configuration management schemes wrapped up in version control, [...]

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Dear users of S3, EC2, and other ‘utility’ computing stuffs:
Here’s a crude and completely oversimplified evolution of infrastructure needs of a growing website, with an assumption:

Have you ‘outgrown’ your original use of utility computing, for whatever reason ? If so, what was the reason? Financial? Technical?
Why I’m asking:
I’m in the process of writing a [...]

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I’m probably very late to this party, but I just discovered Dashboard Spy. Given the amount of “data porn” that folks in webops look at on a daily basis, this sort of stuff is pretty damn interesting.
I’m especially loving the current trend of developing ‘business’ dashboards, since it can fit in quite nicely with infrastructure [...]

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(Only hardworking supernerds should apply)
We’re looking for an experienced and motivated MySQL DBA to help make things go at Flickr.
Stuff you’ll do:
• Work with engineers on performance tuning, query optimization, index tuning.
• Monitor databases for problems and to diagnose where those problems are.
• Work with developers and operations to maintain a scalable, reliable, and robust [...]

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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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There’s a new conference in town, and it looks to have the really good schmitz. Good work Jesse and Steve, I’m really looking forward to this.

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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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“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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