Homo-Adminus Blog

If you will try to compile nginx in Redhat Linux, you can get following error even if you have pcre-devel package installed:

If you are experiencing this small problem, you should simply use following parameter of configure script:

And voila!

Now it can see and will use system PCRE library.

This small article is about Rails+Mongrel setup and its performance. List of other tested deployment schemes, description of testing methodology and, of course, all benchmark results you can find on “Ruby On Rails Benchmark Summary and Findings” page.

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Aftrer my previous post about high-performance RoR deployment methods, I’ve got lots of messages/emails/IM conversations about some errors in previous benchmarks and there were lots of suggestions about extending of tested software set and modifying testing methodology. So, that is why I decided to perform deep and wide performance testing for all deployment schemes I can find. In this article you can find description of testing methodology and, of course, benchmarks results. If you want to know details of specific software setup, take a look at articles in category “Ruby On Rails” to find all articles from “Looking for optimal Solution” series (I’ll post all of them in next few days).

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While I’ve been doing performance testing of different Ruby on Rails deployment schemes, I came across very interesting software - HAProxy.

HAProxy is a TCP/HTTP reverse proxy which is particularly suited for high
availability environments. Indeed, it can :
- route HTTP requests depending on statically assigned cookies ;
- spread the load among several servers while assuring server persistence
through the use of HTTP cookies ;
- switch to backup servers in the event a main one fails ;
- accept connections to special ports dedicated to service monitoring ;
- stop accepting connections without breaking existing ones ;
- add/modify/delete HTTP headers both ways ;
- block requests matching a particular pattern ;

It needs very little resource. Its event-driven architecture allows it to easily
handle thousands of simultaneous connections on hundreds of instances without
risking the system’s stability.

As for me, I’m really impressed by HAProxy’s performance and I will suggest to try to use it in some high-availability environments because of its performance and set of features. Take a look at this software - it is really good tool!

Because of not fully correct testing methodology, benchmark results are not fully correct. So, I decided to redo all tests. New benchmark results you can get in “Looking For Optimal Solution” series Summary post.

This week we have started one new project with Ruby on Rails as primary framework. My first task was to prepare runtime environment for it on one of our development servers. When I have tried to research how people doing it, I noted that there is no information about how to deploy rails application with nginx as frontend and what is performance of such solution. Before blindly make any decisions about future platform I’ve decided to make some performance tests of the some most popular rails web servers/frontends. Results of these tests you can find here with configuration samples for all software that I have used.

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How frequently in your life you have met girls-administrators? Rarely? Never? That is it! Girls-administrators are rarities… So, lets help one of them to implement her dreams and win trip to Bali! Give your voice to Marina Novikova - administrator of http://www.interbase-world.com site and help to implement her dreams!

Votinng is here and will over in two days, so vote now ;-).

Notice: If you can’t read russian, you can get instructions on how to vote on www.interbase-world.com site

Recently we’ve got critical load on one of our new free web hosting servers that handles millions of hits per day. When I’ve tried to analyze how to get more performance from that servers, I noted that these servers has ICH7 chipsets and Seagate SATA drives with NCQ support… But in closer view I noticed, that NCQ support is not enabled on our servers with ata_piix IDE driver. So, I decided that it would be great to enable NCQ and take a look what will happen with performance (it was obvious, that performance should increase)…

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I apologize for the lack of posting on my blog. Life has been pretty busy as last month I started a new job as Senior System Administrator in Toronto, On at a leading video hosting community.

I am very excited about this job and look forward to working with a great team that is really passionate about what they are doing.

As time goes by I will be posting more. At the moment, thanks for staying tuned.

Today Peter Zaitsev announced launch of new forums related to MySQL Performance questions. He says:

This forum is created as free alternative to MySQL Consulting Services which we provide. If you would like to get some free help to your performance issues please use forums so everyone else could benefit from our replies. You also should get more opinions on your performance problems from other forum members. There were a lot of unrelated performance questions placed as comments and sent by email and we had to find better way to organize it.

I think that it is a great idea to start such forums ontop of great blog site because many people can find it from Google when looking for some performance related questions or discussions. So, I want to say good luck to peter and will try to participate any discussions in these forums.