yowkee essential

Update on Dinesh/alphaque, Streamyx

Alphaque is back online, their premium 1.5Mbps SDSL Streamyx connection was down for 80 hours. The reason is ridiculous. As Dinesh said,

The problem ? Apparently one of the jumper cables in the MDF room in our building was not plugged in, thus causing the disconnection. Now, access to this MDF room is solely under Telekom Malaysia's control. Not even building management nor maintanence can get in, and the entire room is theirs. If a jumper cable was not plugged in, then it must have been some fuck up by their technician. Perhaps someone came in to get some work done on Tuesday, and either kicked the cable off, or pulled it out and didn't put it back in again.

Meanwhile, I finally got Dinesh's update on his MySQL benchmarks, which I was waiting for after reading he gonna to implement a terabyte sized MySQL DB. The result is amazing, with proper tuning, a terabyte sized MySQL could still get minisecond range query latencies and thereotical max 4,000 queries/second. The benchmark was done on a dual CPU, 4GB RAM Asus 1U rackserver, running FreeBSD. The lesson:

• Force index selection with USE INDEX for optimization. You could use FORCE INDEX for version 4.0.9 or greater, which act like USE INDEX but with the addition trying the best to avoid table scan.
  
• Link MySQL with LinuxThread if you run MySQL under FreeBSD, with multi-processors machine. Jeremy explained it and thought "using LinuxThreads ought to help even on single-CPU FreeBSD boxes."
  
• Optimization could be dangerous though. Stick with helpful tools and carefully chosen your configuration.