frogcake.net

The 2008 conference season is in full swing and I’m a little sad I couldn’t make it to the MySQL conference this year as I had a great time in 2007 - but not that sad because the reason is I’m going to JavaOne in May and don’t think I could have got approval for two conferences in as many months.

Still, I can live vicariously through all the people blogging the event. Artem Russakovskii’s notes on the Scaling MySQL - Up or Out? keynote have some interesting numbers:

Question One: Number of MySQL servers
Facebook 1,800 (900m/900s)

Question Three: Number of Web Servers
Facebook 10,000

Question Four: Number of Memcached servers
Facebook 805

That is one hella memcached! This post from last year by a facebook engineer lists their number of servers at 200 giving a total of 3TB of cache. If we assume they are using the same kind of kit then they now must have a memcached size of about 12TB!

Scaling is something I’ve been investigating at work recently and we will potentially be dealing with big numbers ourselves so it’s encouraging to know open source applications like MySQL and memcached can scale so massively.

Over the weekend a new work by Banksy appeared on a wall outside the Post Office sorting building in Newman Street near my work.

There’s no tag, so it’s possible it’s not by him but it certainly looks like a Banksy and the fact that, according to the Mail, it required three stories of scaffolding to be erected makes it audacious enough to be his. After all, this is the guy who hung a smiley faced version of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

More pictures in the gallery.