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Kitchen Soap

Thoughts on systems safety, software operations, and sociotechnical systems.

Squid patch for making “time” stats more meaningful.

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 […]

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WebOps Communication Tools

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 […]

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Too big to use utility computing ?

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 […]

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Datacenter Operating Systems

I’m probably late in getting to this, but seeing the article in the WSJ about the RAD project made me stop to take a look. It appears to be a collection of different projects, all relating to infrastructure deployment/management and various research topics surrounding it. Looks cool so far.

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Loving Dashboard Spy.

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 […]

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Flickr’s hiring a dba.

(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 […]

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