Xaprb

Cary Millsap has a concise, readable paper on performance. Anyone involved in database performance optimization should read it. Cary’s writing has heavily influenced the mk-query-digest tool for analyzing MySQL/PostgreSQL/Memcached/HTTP query performance, and I think you’ll get a lot more from mk-query-digest if you read this paper — and you should also read his book, reviewed here. It’s one of the top books on my Essential Books List.

I’m going to present at the EdUIConf conference 2009. This is a conference focused in two directions: Web professionals in higher education, and higher education for web professionals. I believe it’s going to be comparable to, or at least in the same vein as, some of the more popular conferences about user interface design, Web standards, and the like. (It’ll also be much more affordable.)

The speaker lineup boasts a number of heavy hitters. I’m guessing those of you in the Web design profession will know the following name: Molly Holzschlag. If you don’t, crawl out from whatever rock you’ve been hiding under!

My own session at this conference will be on the topic of Web front-end performance. I’ve dubbed it High-Performance Web Interface Design, and I’ll focus on a practical approach to performance. Nothing I’ll show you is revolutionary. The problem is, even though it’s not revolutionary to get good client-side performance, people don’t do it, and users suffer terrible interfaces that don’t download, render, or interact in a snappy fashion.

This will be a relatively fast-paced overview of Web front-end performance, and I’ll show you a demo of a badly performing website (such as the type I see often), make some changes to it, and let you see the performance difference.

If you register, I would appreciate you entering my name in the “how did you hear about this” text box. That will give me a chance to win a laptop. *grin*

It seems that a lot of people want to try to improve MySQL performance by focusing on server status counters and configuration variables. Looking at counters, and “tuning the server,” is better than nothing, but only barely. You care first and foremost about how long it takes to execute a query, not about how many of this-and-that the server performs or about how big or small this-and-that buffer is. What you really need is timing information.

You can use the slow query log to find timing information about queries, and then you can examine those queries with SHOW PROFILES to see the timing information about the query’s execution itself.

This concept is very simple and absolutely fundamental: if you care about time (and you do!), then measure and optimize time. But it’s so often overlooked or misunderstood.

The addition of SHOW PROFILES was a major step forward in the ability to optimize server and application performance. (Thanks Jeremy Cole!) As time passes and people upgrade their servers, it’s becoming more common to see it in production, which is an enormous help. Now that the differences between the Community and Enterprise versions of the server have been erased, it will be available in all future server versions, which is great news.