I’ve been meaning to post about this for weeks now, but haven’t got around to it. The PHP UK Conference is coming up on the 26th of February in London and my boss, Remo Biagioni, is one of the speakers. Here’s some information about Remo and the talk from the official site:
Remo’s Bio:
Remo is Head of Research & Development at Stickyeyes, a search marketing agency based in Leeds. The R&D team works on a mixture of client site builds, internal reporting tools and Market Defender a search marketing intelligence tool. His team works mainly with PHP, MySQL and Apache. Remo graduated with an MSc in pure mathematics having covered programming in Fortran, Pascal, Lisp & C; he joined BT’s R&D Labs at Martlesham Heath working on large scale systems (a dozen mainframes, a few hundred Unix servers…) before getting an MBA and leaving to set up his own web development business. Remo sold the business in 2008 and joined Stickyeyes. Remo is passionate about object-orientated coding and can talk for hours about the Liskov Subsitution Principle, test driven development and solid software engineering.
The Talk – Database Optimisation:
A real life example getting more throughput with fewer queries.
Over the last year we’ve grown a database from a few hundred megabytes to just over one terabyte. The database is reported on and populated by a network of servers using PHP. As the database has grown we’ve had to look again our initial assumptions and ways of working. One table has over 2billion rows; 2.5 million rows every day are added to another table. This talk will cover how we use explain, foreign keys, normalising data without sacrificing performance, queuing and using memcache. And, how we’ve made the system run faster now than it did with a much smaller database.
Without going into too much detail, the talk basically centres around the work that myself, Wade and the rest of our team have been doing over the course of the last year and a half.
Much of the content will be familiar to those who read my blog. It’s about scaling MySQL from a couple of hundred megabyte data store in our office, to a two server set up holding over a terabyte of data, fed by tens of servers, all the whileincreasing the speed at which we could store and retrieve data. It’ll cover how we implemented beanstalkd and memcached to lessen database load, and I’d imagine it will also touch on our ongoing implementation of HAProxy load balancing.
If you’re attending the conference and this sounds interesting to you, make sure you get to the talk. Wade and I will be around as well, to answer any questions that might come up throughout the day. As always, you can also ask the questions here, and if the answer is interesting enough, it might make it into the talk (though no promises!)
