The Pith of Performance: Velocity Conference

Showing posts with label Velocity Conference. Show all posts

Friday, June 25, 2010

Velocity 2010 The Aftermathglow

I was so impressed with Velocity 2009, I really wanted to present something at Velocity 2010.

Thread-limited scalability of memcached
Working with Shanti and Stefan of Oracle (née Sun Microsystems), I was able to accomplish that goal. Our session was rated 92.4%, which is an A+ in anyone's books. Congrats to us and the Velocity organizers and thank you, crowd.

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.

Towards a Cloud Capacity-Cost Formula

One of the (unscheduled) plenary sessions at Velocity 2009, was entitled: “Why elasticity, performance, and analytics will change how Webops is judged" (PDF), given by Alistair Croll. An earlier version of Alistair's ideas can be read on his blog. As I understand it, he's attempting to tie together the capacity-on-demand concept of cloud computing with the way a user is charged for resource consumption and how the provider counts revenue; a kind of dynamic capacity planning and chargeback association. Currently, for example, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Salesforce, all do this differently. This looks like a very important point, which I would like to understand more thoroughly. By slide 3 in his presentation, he refers to a simple capacity formula and that's what I want to discuss here, because that's what suddenly locked up my attention.

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.