Anyone thats ever grown an application from a couple thousand hits a day to a couple hundred thousand has run into db optimization issues at some point. The best teacher is experience and Bravenet was a great teacher. During Bravenets prime years, we had six load-balanced clusters, each with 5 webservers and one MySQL database server. Our...

The auto loading path which make models in subdirectories of app/models load in Ra about sex back then but I'd read about it in The Joy of Sex and watched it on TV. There's something about actually doing it that you don't understand through those other mediums. Learning about testing has been a very similar experience for me. I've known about...

The guys over at LiteSpeed really stepped it up this time with their support for Ruby on Rails in their newest release of LiteSpeed 2.2. The ability to configure and deploy a Rails site now has its own configuration page in the administration GUI. Once you define the defaults for RoR applications on your webserver, you can setup and deploy a...

Anyone thats ever grown an application from a couple thousand hits a day to a couple hundred thousand has run into db optimization issues at some point. The best teacher is experience and Bravenet was a great teacher. During Bravenets prime years, we had six load-balanced clusters, each with 5 webservers and one MySQL database server. Our...

While installing all the pre-requisites for running Rails on my new Mac Pro, I ran across a problem with either the mysql gem or mysql 5.0.24 where it depends on 'ulong' being defined by the OS include files. On OS X it isn't, and this causes the ruby mysql gem to fail compilation which causes Rails to (possibly) throw a Lost Connection to...

While installing all the pre-requisites for running Rails on my new Mac Pro, I ran across a problem with either the mysql gem or mysql 5.0.24 where it depends on 'ulong' being defined by the OS include files. On OS X it isn't, and this causes the ruby mysql gem to fail compilation which causes Rails to (possibly) throw a Lost Connection to...

The auto loading path which make models in subdirectories of app/models load in Ra about sex back then but I'd read about it in The Joy of Sex and watched it on TV. There's something about actually doing it that you don't understand through those other mediums. Learning about testing has been a very similar experience for me. I've known about...

The guys over at LiteSpeed really stepped it up this time with their support for Ruby on Rails in their newest release of LiteSpeed 2.2. The ability to configure and deploy a Rails site now has its own configuration page in the administration GUI. Once you define the defaults for RoR applications on your webserver, you can setup and deploy a...

At work we have a lot of issues with monitoring and logging. We run a lot of different services as EJBs in Weblogic clusters. They get a lot of use, so much so, that logging can actually make a real performance problem. The main issues are: The logs are not aggregated in any one place. There are a lot of ad-hoc scripts to do remote greps...

At work we have a lot of issues with monitoring and logging. We run a lot of different services as EJBs in Weblogic clusters. They get a lot of use, so much so, that logging can actually make a real performance problem. The main issues are: The logs are not aggregated in any one place. There are a lot of ad-hoc scripts to do remote greps...

For the first 6 months of this blogs life, the browser usage of my visitors looked something like this: IEs: 15% Mozillas 79% Others: 6% Now that things have slowed down, their browser usings looks like this: IEs: 42% Mozillas 52% Others: 6% What is happening to Mozilla's market...

For the first 6 months of this blogs life, the browser usage of my visitors looked something like this: IEs: 15% Mozillas 79% Others: 6% Now that things have slowed down, their browser usings looks like this: IEs: 42% Mozillas 52% Others: 6% What is happening to Mozilla's market...

I started a new job last month, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. I enjoyed working at a small Java consulting company, but the margins are too small, and life is a little too uncertain for me. I'll never forget two quotes from the most recent project I worked on: Early on in the project, a new developer was...

I started a new job last month, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. I enjoyed working at a small Java consulting company, but the margins are too small, and life is a little too uncertain for me. I'll never forget two quotes from the most recent project I worked on: Early on in the project, a new developer was...

Last year you wrote some middleware using EJBs. This year your boss tells you that a C++ client needs to talk to those beans. You consider SOAP, but are dicouraged by reading about its performace. Papers showing SOAP is 100 to 1000 times slower than RMI are all over the place. Even with the newest pull parsers it still can't meet your...