I attended SCALE for the first time this past weekend and highly recommend it. They had not only talks, but all-day training sessions for which you would reasonably expect to pay hundreds of dollars. I also got to meet Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Apache Bigtop founder Konstantin Boudnik, and Randal L. Schwartz, whose Learning Perl I referenced countless times back in my Perl days. Plus I got to spend quality time with good friends.
Here are my notes from talks. I’m no longer in admin/DevOps, so I picked talks that piqued my interest.
Scaling – from Joel Salas of HauteLook
They are an ecommerce site that has to deal with high burst traffic. It’s LAMP, so not entirely applicable to my stack (Grails), but there were some good tips that many high traffic sites could use:
- Tuned, a Linux daemon that collects data and allows you to set optimal system defaults that can have a big difference.
- He prefers Gatling over JMeter for load testing. (I’ll note I’ve had good success with the latter, but never hurts to learn about new tools.)
- Varnish, in addition to a CDN.
- SolrCloud for search.
Postgresql EXPLAIN PLAN – from Josh Berkus of Red Hat
- Explain.depesz.com – formats results of EXPLAIN
- pgAdmin graphical explain feature
- irc.freenode.net #postgresql – for asking for help
Postgresql for big data/data science – from Jim Nasby
- Slony and Londiste should no longer be used
- Can scale to 80+ cores
- pg_shard – for sharding/replicating PG tables
- cstore – columnar data store
- PGStrom – allows PG to utilize the GPU
- PostgREST – give any PG DB a REST API
- Toro DB – Mongo DB compatible JSON document DB, but built on Postgresq. Can save you a ton of space and I/O.
Dart by Randal Schwartz
- Looking really good, lots of progress made, in use on big projects (100+ devs) at Google
- Works on Node.js
- Lot of work into making it compile into readable JavaScript
- Great features taken from Java: types, reflection, concurrency, async futures, streams
- Removes unused functions on packaging (smaller downloads, e.g., won’t include all of jQuery)
- Pub is where everyone shares open source packages: https://pub.dartlang.org/
- Free book to learn, kept up to date: https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/