Homo-Adminus Blog

Today I was doing some work on one of our database servers (each of them has 4 SAS disks in RAID10 on an Adaptec controller) and it required huge multi-thread I/O-bound read load. Basically it was a set of parallel full-scan reads from a 300Gb compressed innodb table (yes, we use innodb plugin). Looking at the iostat I saw pretty expected results: 90-100% disk utilization and lots of read operations per second. Then I decided to play around with linux I/O schedulers and try to increase disk subsystem throughput. Here are the results:

(more…)

Question: Do you think you have what it takes to take a service from a few hundred thousand users to tens of millions of users in 1 year flat? If you do read on and perhaps become the next beloved scalability rockstar of our age.

We are looking for a data charmer. A mysql magician. A code hack. A funny man. A mad man. A passionate man. Or perhaps a woman who does all these things and more.

Here’s what you gotta do:

• Pro-active and reactive performance analysis, monitoring and general database plumbing of all leaky issues.
• Work with others on the team to help maintain/improve and support the infrastructure for a high traffic, high growth site
• Optimize and tune the database day to day
• Algorithmic bent. Develop algos to quicken search times, response times, find shortest paths between various connections on site.
• Have solid low level networking/protocol/computer security skills
• Log everything. Usage stats, search stats, user behaviour stats. Draw conclusions. Constantly refine and tinker.
• Help with periodic large storage migrations
• Work intimately with operations, development, and strategy team to ensure smooth deployments of new iterations, high availability of database services.
• Understand capacity planning. Always thinking 10 steps ahead. (Whether it means looking at distributed systems services, cloud computing options, evaluating HA models used in other industries etc)
• Have a pulse on the state of the web, social media, social networking, different scalability architectures, benefits/negatives of each.
• Interest in high concurrency, distributed systems architectures.
• General low level hacking/scripting/optimizations in perl/python.
• Evaluate changing conditions in the archi
• Think creatively. No dogmatists.

Ideal skillset:

• BS in Comp Sci or equivalent
• 5+ years experiene with Linux/Unix systems
• 3+ years with MySQL in production environment
• Knowledge and experience with partitioned architectures and a database sharding techniques
• Capacity planning/high growth planning/emergency planning experience
• Passion, bordering on paranoia, for hunting bottlenecks, and optimizing IO operations
• Experience with MySQL replication
• Deep experience with MySQL internals
• Experience with performance analysis tools, storage engines, backup methodologies for MySQL
• Great perl/shell scripting experience
• Team player, self motivated, able to handle high stress situations while maintaining a calm disposition
• Great communication skills, attention for detail, and an interest in the business side of the equation of systems/scale planning
• Eat/sleep/breathe the web, startups, and the landscape of the social web
• Insomniac

We’re ready to offer an aggressive salary with tremendous upside by way of stock options, commensurate with your experience, your drive and your results.

Apply directly to:

net ‘dot’ startup ‘at’ googles mail service dot com

by sending us a CV/resume, and optionally, a link to your blog or Linkedin profile.

Please help save Ivan, son of Andrii Nikitin (MySQL Support Engineer), who needs a bone marrow transplant. Andrii’s message is below:

“My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.

“8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.

“Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.

“Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is able to get ~60% of that by selling the flat where parents leave and some other goods, but we still require external help.”

– Andrii Nikitin, MySQL Engineer

For donation: Donation can be made through PayPal (via MySQL/Sun website)