Web Stack 1.5

.

Radiation-Hardened SPARC

Atmel Introduces the AT697F Radiation-Hardened SPARC V8 Processor for Space Missions.

Joerg explains on why SPARC?:

"The reason is not Solaris. It´s a different one. Despite general opinion, SPARC isn´t a proprietary architecture. You get go to SPARC International, get the specification for a 100 bucks or so and you can develop and manufacture your own SPARC CPU. This was used by the European Space Agency to develop a radiation hardened version of a SPARC architecture. The development is called LEON, the proc named in the article uses the LEON2-FT design. The LEON2 and LEON3 design are available under the GNU General Public License respectively under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Being able to get such an architecture essentially for cheap money was the essential reason behind the decision for SPARC (besides of other technical reasons)"

Why Power 4.7GHz is slower than SPARC 1.6GHz?

RAID-Z3

RAID-Z3 (triple-parity RAID) has been implemented and integrated into snv_120 (bug id 6854612) - thanks to Adam Leventhal. Read more on Adam's blog.

Windows 7

Alright Ben you've convinced me to try Windows 7 especially as you can download it and try it for free.

MySQL - 8x Performance Improvement

I came across an interesting problem today. A perl script running a mysql query and it takes too much time to complete. It spends almost all its time while waiting for this mysql query (anonymized):

select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where date(registered) >= date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day)

The problem is that there are over 70 million rows in the XXX table and the query takes over 7 minutes to complete mostly waiting for a disk I/O.

explain select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where date(registered) >= date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day)\G

          id: 1
 select_type: SIMPLE
       table: XXX
        type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
     key_len: NULL
         ref: NULL
        rows: 72077742
       Extra: Using where
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

So the reason it is so slow is that mysql does not use an index here. It turned out that if you use a function on a column in a where statement then mysql won't use an index!

There is a reason why the statement is using date() and date_sub() functions as it is expected to compare dates where time is 00:00:00 so I can't . But one can cast() functions to timestamp and used registered directly which will allow mysql to use index:

explain select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where registered >= cast(date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day) as datetime)

          id: 1
 select_type: SIMPLE
       table: XXX
        type: range
possible_keys: YYY
          key: YYY
     key_len: 9
         ref: NULL
        rows: 1413504
       Extra: Using where
1 row in set (0.10 sec)

After the modification the script takes about 50s to execute compared to over 7 minutes which is a very nice 8x performance improvement! Not to mention a much less impact on a database server.