The Pith of Performance: Ignite

Showing posts with label Ignite. Show all posts

Friday, March 19, 2010

Memcached Scalability at Velocity 2010

Totally stoked about being selected for the Web Performance track at Velocity 2010.

Here's our abstract:

Hidden Scalability Gotchas in Memcached and Friends

Neil Gunther (Performance Dynamics), Shanti Subramanyam (Oracle Corporation), Stefan Parvu (Sun Microsystems)

Most web deployments have standardized on horizontal scaleout in every tier—web, application, caching and database—using cheap, off-the-shelf, white boxes. In this approach, there are no real expectations for vertical scalability of server apps like memcached or the full LAMP stack. But with the potential for highly concurrent scalability offered by newer multicore processors, it is no longer cost-effective to ignore their underutilization due to poor, thread-level, scalability of the web stack. In this session we show you how to quantify scalability with the Universal Scalability Law (USL) by demonstrating its application to actual performance data collected from a memcached benchmark. As a side effect of our technique, you will see how the USL also identifies the most signficant performance tuning opportunities to improve web app scalability.

Ignite! San Jose 2009: The Afterburn

It's been over a month since I did the Ignite event in San Jose, but I have simply had so many things to do since then, that I'm only catching up on blogging about it now.

The title of my Ignite talk was "Scalability for Quantheads: How to Do It Between Spreadsheets" (a pitch for applying my Universal Scalability Law to Web 2.0 applications using Excel spreadsheets). Since scalability is about sustainable size, I used the theme of giants as a hook. Why are there no 30 ft (10 m) giants like the one in the "Jack and the Beanstalk" fairytale? Officially, there have been no human giants taller than 10 feet (3 m); and even they need leg supports. The reasons are given in my Chap. 4 of my Guerrilla Capacity Planning book.