Monthly Archives: January 2011

caching, open source, PHP, scalability, tuning

phpBenelux : conference done – slides up – webcast coming soon

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phpBenelux 2011 was a huge success. After last year’s one-day conference the phpBenelux team decided to add a half day of conference and add a half day of tutorials as well. I wasn’t able to attend many of the talks, but heard a lot of good things about the talks, the food, the atmosphere, etc.

On Friday, I presented a tutorial called ‘Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability’ at the phpBenelux Conference. The slides are now available here (Slideshare). If you were at my talk, please rate it here (Joind.in). Since it was the first time I gave this talk, any feedback would be most welcome.

Sadly, because of issues with servers (2 disk failures and a burnt out CPU), I was unable to present the planned live benchmark, so I will do a webcast in March in which I will go through the step-by-step process of getting a site from having no performance and no scalability to the point where it can scale way beyond Slashdot-effect handling levels. That way, people who follow the webcast can see for themselves what effect each of the changes (adding the different kinds of caching, distributing the cache, adding Nginx, adding reverse proxies, tuning the DB, tuning the Webserver and ofcourse tuning the frontend) has on the performance and the scalability of the Website. It will definitely be an eye-opener for a lot of people !

For an exact date, check back here in Feburary or follow me on Twitter @wimgtr

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Presenting “Caching and Tuning Fun for High Scalability” at phpBenelux

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On Jan 28-29 the second phpBenelux conference will be held in Edegem, a small town near Antwerp, Belgium. phpBenelux is the largest php usergroup for the Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxemburg) area.

I’ve been given the opportunity to give a 3-hour tutorial on the 28th. Here’s a quick rundown of what I will be diving into during that tutorial :
– General introduction into caching (what it is, what types of caching techniques there are, etc.)
– Some common caching implementations (the good, the bad and the ugly)
– How to keep your site scalable by caching
– How to bring down your site (how NOT to cache !) – i.e. commonly used techniques that lead to disaster
– Caching outside the box
– Spread, don’t duplicate
– Scalable alternatives to LAMMP (no, not a typo !)
– Applying Varnish
– Backend done, let’s go frontend !
– Tuning quickies
– Finally, a live demo with all of the described techniques applied while performing a stress-test – things might (will) most likely go horribly wrong here 😉

I’m looking forward to presenting this tutorial. If you want to be there, visit the phpBenelux Conference site or order your ticket while you still can !

See you all on the 28th !