Xaprb

This year’s Surge conference was a great sophomore event to follow up last year’s inaugural conference. A lot of very smart people were there, and the hallway track was great.

I presented on three things: a lightning talk about causes of MySQL downtime; I chaired a panel on Big Data and the Cloud; and I showed how to derive scalability and performance metrics from TCP traffic. I’ve sent my slides to the Surge organizers, and I understand that they will be posting them as well as integrating them into the video of my session. In the meanwhile you can download my slides from Percona’s presentations page.

If you’re going to Surge, which you should, you need to book your hotel now, or you’ll lose the conference discount. It’s a nice hotel and a great discount. It also supports the conference if you book this hotel — conference venues typically put a requirement in the contract that they must sell X number of rooms for the conference, or the organizer has to pay a penalty.

I’ll be speaking at Surge again this year. This time, unlike last year’s talk, I’m tackling a very concrete topic: extracting scalability and performance metrics from TCP network traffic. It turns out that most things that communicate over TCP can be analyzed very elegantly just by capturing arrival and departure timestamps of packets, nothing more. I’ll show examples where different views on the same data pull out completely different insights about the application, even though we have no information about the application itself (okay, I actually know that it’s a MySQL database, and a lot about the actual database and workload, but I don’t need that in order to do what I’ll show you). It’s an amazingly powerful technique that I continue to find new ways to apply to real systems.

Take a look at the other speakers too — it is an impressive lineup. I hope you can attend. Last year’s show was a great event.