GCaP Training: A Rock-solid Investment

Looking for a rock-solid investment during the financial meltdown? Seats are still available for the next Guerrilla Capacity Planning class, which will be held in November at our Larkspur Landing location.


Click on the image for details.

For those of you coming from international locations, here is a table of current exchange rates. We look forward to seeing all of you in November!

My CMG 2008 Presentations

1. Sunday Workshop: "How High Will It Fly? Predicting Scalability"
   Session 184, Sunday 8:30 AM - Noon
   Room: Champagne 3/4
   

Logjam at the London Stock Exchange

Guerrilla Graduate Paul P., sent me this WSJ bit on the recent 7-hour outage at the LSE, with the remark: "This kind of outage is a big, big deal in my world." This is the second technical failure at the LSE in 2008. The article points at capacity problems:

"Traders experienced problems connecting to TradElect, a 15-month-old proprietary LSE platform developed with Microsoft Corp. technology that the LSE has touted as allowing it to expand and speed up its capacity for trades."

"By early afternoon, the LSE was informally telling customers that its system would be back online. That appears to have created a logjam as customers tried to reconnect at the same time."

This is almost a replica of a problem described by my colleague Steve Jenkin in our 2006 CMG-Australia paper:

"That load was completely disabled to improve system throughput for the most interesting capacity planning period on the busiest day. This scheduling was mandated by the Secure Hosting Facility after a software fault caused a flood of more than 6,000 emails to be issued after a multi-day stoppage. Such an email flood, containing several days of traffic in 10 minutes, brought the facility mail system to its knees ..."

Some things ...

Google Chrome: Does It Shine?

The envelope please!

This early review indicates the luster is already off Chrome, due to some serious performance issues related to the Adobe Flash plug-in being a CPU hog. Unlike FireFox, there's no workaround.

Best Practices

The Guerrilla Manual advises: Best practices are an admission of failure (last item in Section 1). As Wittgenstein said: "Just because we all agree on something, doesn't make it right."

Guerrilla graduate Scott J., sent me the following cartoon by Scott Adams, which offers a Dilbert profundity on the same topic.



For me, the punch line IS the 2nd frame. You may need to click on the strip to see the Dilbert punch line in the 3rd frame.

Scalability Workshop in Melbourne, Australia

NICTA is offering a 2-day workshop entitled:

Application Scalability By The Numbers

given by yours truly in Melbourne, Nov 5-6, 2008.

If you're in the area, you might also pass this on to other interested colleagues and otherwise contact Anne-Marie Eliseo at industryeducation@nicta.com.au or phone: +61-8-8302-3928 for more details. They are trying to figure out if they should run it in Sydney as well. Your feedback could help them.

The Valley Ain't What It Used To Be

Important interview in the SF Chron with hi-tech maven, Judy Estrin, where she warns about lagging innovation in the Si Valley and the USA. She is quoted as saying:

"That all sorts of forces, from Wall Street's quarterly profit pressures to worsening government deficits, have undermined support for the forward-looking research on which future products will depend."

I've certainly been complaining for a long time about the excessive influence of Wall St. on shortening capacity planning horizons. Estrin also claims that the environment for innovation in Silicon Valley and the United States has already changed for the worse. Whether you agree everything she says or not, I think her comments are important because there seem to be precious few figureheads who are prepared to stand up and tell as it is.

Updated on Thu Aug 28, 2008: Case in point from Slashdot regarding Alcatel-Lucent (née Bell Labs) yanking the financial plug on basic science "like yer startin' a mower!" (to quote Elaine Benes). As I've said before , the Edison model is dead.