Make 43 Things Faster

I’m doing a bunch of refactoring. Today I’m turning a lot of code that looks like this:

if thing.nil? || thing.empty?

into this:

if thing.blank?

We’re not quite done with the new database load balancing setup, but one side effect of what we’re working on is that pages are about 25-50% faster for logged in users. You can check out Ivan’s diagram of the setup on the blog:

http://blog.robotcoop.com/2008/02/27/load-balancing-act/

For a 4 day class focusing on performance tuning. We’ve already found 2 things that we can try…

We’re taking a 3 day class about “MySQL High Availability”. The first day was mostly stuff we already know about replication, but we should start covering clustering which should be interesting.

Eric released a new version of memcache-client that really speeds up our cache puts.

Oddly enough it does nothing when testing outside of the running applications…

Ivan and I upgraded memcached last night. The upgrade seems to have made a bunch of “Broken Pipe” errors magically disappear, which should make things better. Those broken pipes really clog up the intertubes.

I’ve gotten munin monitoring up, and it’s starting to collect data. The mysql plugins will be especially useful.