Whitepaper on Memcached with MySQL

If you have or are in the process of developing a decent size web app you will have to address some performance issues at some point. Caching is good way to address some of the performance problems. The guys at MySQL have a nice whitepaper on Memcached. Unfortunately you have to register and then they will send you an email with the file.

Here is the address: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql_wp_memcached.php

A quick extract from the site with the usual marketing blurb.

Memached is an open-source, distributed memory caching system designed to tackle today’s web-scale performance and scalability challenges. Many of the largest and most heavily trafficked web properties on the Internet like Facebook, Fotolog, YouTube, Mixi.jp, Yahoo, and Wikipedia deploy Memcached and MySQL to satisfy the demands of millions of users and billions of page views every month. By integrating a caching tier into their web- scale architectures, these organizations have improved their application performance while minimizing database load. In doing so, they manage to increase their scalability to accommodate more concurrent users and spikes in traffic while at the same time making the most efficient use of their existing computing infrastructure.

Alt 3 or should I say Hash #

I’ve only recently starting using a Mac so imagine my joy when I got to teach a Mac veteran something. Ok it wasn’t anything that impressive but it made me laugh so I thought I’d share it with all of you. The Mac keyboards don’t have the hash key (#) so you have to use the Alt + 3 key combination.

I have to dedicate this to Caffeinehit

Facebook for the family - see family news on Kindo

Most people really like finding out what their friends have been doing. Facebook seems to have done a great job at producing a feed of news for all your friends. Problem is that i seen to have far too many acquaintances and it is filled with irrelevant information.

Kindo have done something similar but focussed on your family. The Our Family section shows some interesting statistics on your family members coupled with a great news feed.

I personally like the calendar which shows all birthdays and anniversaries. It even shows details for people not signed up. This is great in my family because a lot of the oldies aren’t online.

Homer Simpson family tree

Have a look at the family tree of Homer Simpson. I never knew the Simpson family had such an extensive list of relatives. There is an 80 person family tree to make any genealogy enthusiast happy.

Here is a picture of the family tree:

There is even some details on each person in the family tree. Here is a snapshot of Homer’s profile:

There are also a number of other family trees of various celebrities.

Export birthdays from Facebook into iCal format

Facebook is great for reminding me when my friends (or acquaintances) birthdays are. There is one small problem in that I don’t always look at my facebook calendar. Demian put me onto this nifty birthday calendar exporter.

The app allows you to export all birthday events into iCal format which can be used by a number of calendar tools including: Google Calendar & Apple iCal. I tested imports into both of these and they worked perfectly

Thanks to Kurt Kluever and Christopher Tice for developing this.

Facebook scaling and replication with MySQL

I was wondering how Facebook handled the massive load they get each week. They receive on average 2 million new users each week - wow! Well with all the existing traffic and the new load just how do they cope?

There is a great blog post by Jason Sobel on the Facebook blog here. Some of the nifty tricks include:

• Replicating the MySQL databases
• Multiple data centres. One west coast and the other east cost.
• Splitting traffic dependent on your location effectively load balancing
• Caching data using memcached (developed for LiveJournal originally)

Those Facebook engineers are crafty. I remember hearing the guys at Friendster also did some similar things with MySQL. There is case study on the MySQL site.

Do you have any scaling advice when using PHP and MySQL?

Performance boost for Kindo

It looks like the tech ninjas at Kindo have solved the performance problems. The site is looking much quicker for my tree. Nice work guys.

Social networking explained simply

The guys at The Common Craft Show have produced a great video that explains social networking in plain English. Have you ever tried to explain this concept to someon and got one of those blank confused looks? I suggest you show them this video.

Kindo goes live with Arabic

Kindo has added Arabic to its list of languages. RTL languages are not easy to implement. The implementation looks good from my non Arabic speaking perspective

Kindo has also supported the following languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese and Afrikaans

I keen to see what next is going to be released. Family 2.0 is cool.

DrewPreston gets engaged to Robyn

I got engaged on Friday last week. Robyn and I are still smiling and can’t wait to get married. The planning has started and I can tell you there is certainly a lot to do.

I updated my Kindo profile and changed my relationship status to engaged. It was a great way to enounce the news to some of those relatives that are in the family network. Have a look a a screenshot:

I blocked out some of my family to keep them private.

Anyhow it is really exciting news. I’ll keep you all posted as the plans unfold.