Even though there aren’t DTrace probes for MySQL released yet, we can still get useful information from MySQL. DTrace has a pid provider which allows us to get into any function the program is executing and see it’s arguments. The only drawback is you have to go digging around in the source code to find…

Fundamental Philosophy and Origin Accelerators rose from two needs: a standardized stack capable of serving our own growing applications and the appearance last year of large companies and startups needing “enterprise rails”. Our applications, like Strongspace and the Joyent Connector are over 2 years old now, were some of the earliest revenue-generating Rails applications and…

Back in August, I posted about a good-sized evaluation I was going to start doing about the horizontal scaling of different proxy engines and load-balancers across lots of mongrels. But in short, we’ve stayed with F5’s BIG-IPs for at least one additional reason beyond their ability to handled gigabits of traffic across many many backend…

I was reading GigaOM the other day, specifically Google’s 2006 Money Shot, $10 billion in revenues, and his quote from Google’s earning release caught my eye: Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $307 million, or 10% of revenues, in…

There’s a lot of talk lately about “grids”. And Amazon. The word “grid” has reappeared in marketing materials and we’ve seen it brought up during the the emergence of companies offering utility computing and storage products (or at least they want you to think that’s what they’re really offering). There’s also definitely been a PR…

Ah, Ben understands and did a great demonstration of thin provisioning (also read Dave’s Blog) with ZFS using sparse volumes (zvols). HUGE. The ability to thin provision storage is a very “enterprise” feature that one can know get from free when using ZFS+Opensolaris. When combined with ethernet-based storage networks (iSCSI), it’s unstoppable. Ben’s also a…

Bryan has a couple of quick quick examples of using DTrace to go through some parts of a Rails application. As one starts working more and more with web frameworks that depends on many pieces from other people, it’s pretty clear that being able to quickly and completely look at what your application is doing…