Using Nginx, SSI and Memcache to Make Your Web Applications Faster
5 Aug2007

If you’d take a look at any web site, you will notice, that almost all of the pages on this given site are pretty static in their nature. Or course, this site could have some dynamic elements like login field or link in the header, some customized menu elements and some other things… But entire page could be considered static in many cases.

When I started thinking about my sites from this point of view, I understood, how great it would be to be able to cache entire page somewhere (in memcache for example) and be able to send it to the user without any requests to my applications, which are pretty slow (comparing to memcache 😉 ) in content generation. Then I came up with a pretty simple and really powerful idea I’ll describe in this article. An idea of caching entire pages of the site and using my application only to generate small partials of the page. This idea allows me to handle hundreds of queries with one server running pretty slow (yeah! it is slow even after all optimizations on MySQL side and lots of tweaks in site’s code) Ruby on Rails application. Of course, the idea is kind of universal and could be used with any back-end languages, technologies or frameworks because all of them are slower then memcache in content “generation”.

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Best Tech Videos 2.0 has been released!
9 Jul2007

So, we did it! New Best Tech Videos site version has been released today. Of course, it could have some issues, and we are really looking forward for your feedback on our support forums.

Let’s review main improvements we’ve made here:

  • First of all, I want to mention our first step to socialization of the BTV – all our users could signup now and get their own lists of favorited, commented and voted videos and much more – they could have their own personal RSS feeds.
  • Next cool thing we’ve prepared for you is user-generated content! You can find some great videos on the Net and share them with fellow BTV readers. At this moment our posting system works in pre-moderated mode to keep really high level of videos we post here, but later we want to delegate moderation to our most active members.
  • As I mentioned before – we have our own video rating system. All our users could vote for videos they like and then we’ll let users to decide, what videos they would like to watch based on these votes.

So, these are just small part (but most valuable) of our ideas. If you want to have a look at all of them, just sign up and start using the service – you gonna like it, we’re sure!

Thanks to all our readers, without your help this release would not happen!


MySQL Proxy Released
30 Jun2007

Few month ago I heard about some initial work on MySQL Proxy software by Jan Kneschke and I thought about implementing some type of MySQL Replication Aggregator based on this software. The idea was to create some piece of software which could get many replication streams, merge them and feed to some mysql slave. This software could be used for backup purposes and many other interesting things. But back then mysqlproxy distribution has been suspended (afaik, by MySQL AB because of some legal issues).

And at last, today MySQL Proxy project has been released to public and it became much more flexible so I think we need to take a look at it and try to implement such replication aggregator patches for it.


MySQL UC 2007 Videos are Available!
25 May2007

Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.

So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.

P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.