UNVEILING PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS WITH FLAMEGRAPHS USING ASYNC-PROFILER
Welcome to the first article of ‘The Month of Profiling,’ a series I will be presenting throughout November. We’ll explore a range of technologies that are crucial for identifying and resolving performance issues, as well as for fine-tuning your systems. The series will conclude with a detailed walkthrough on how to integrate these technologies for effective performance optimization. Introduction Optimizing the performance of a complex application like a database requires a deep understanding of multiple components; its resource utilization, the behavior of the JVM, and how nodes interact with each other.
UNCOVER CASSANDRA'S THROUGHPUT BOUNDARIES WITH THE NEW ADAPTIVE SCHEDULER IN TLP-STRESS
Introduction Apache Cassandra remains the preferred choice for organizations seeking a massively scalable NoSQL database. To guarantee predictable performance, Cassandra administrators and developers rely on benchmarking tools like tlp-stress, nosqlbench, and ndbench to help them discover their cluster’s limits. In this post, we will explore the latest advancements in tlp-stress, highlighting the introduction of the new Adaptive Scheduler. This brand-new feature allows users to more easily uncover the throughput boundaries of Cassandra clusters while remaining within specific read and write latency targets.
AXONOPS REVIEW - AN OPERATIONS PLATFORM FOR APACHE CASSANDRA
Note: Before we dive into this review of AxonOps and their offerings, it’s important to note that this blog post is part of a paid engagement in which I provided product feedback. AxonOps had no influence or say over the content of this post and did not have access to it prior to publishing. In the ever-evolving landscape of data management, companies are constantly seeking solutions that can simplify the complexities of database operations.
BENCHMARKING APACHE CASSANDRA WITH TLP-STRESS
This post will introduce you to tlp-stress, a tool for benchmarking Apache Cassandra. I started tlp-stress back when I was working at The Last Pickle. At the time, I was spending a lot of time helping teams identify the root cause of performance issues and needed a way of benchmarking. I found cassandra-stress to be difficult to use and configure, so I ended up writing my own tool that worked in a manner that I found to be more useful.
BACK TO CONSULTING!
Saying “it’s been a while since I wrote anything here” would be an understatement, but I’m back, with a lot to talk about in the upcoming months. First off - if you’re not aware, I continued writing, but on The Last Pickle blog. There’s quite a few posts there, here are the most interesting ones: 14 Things To Do When Setting Up a New Cassandra Cluster Apache Cassandra Performance Tuning - Compression with Mixed Workloads Garbage Collection Tuning for Apache Cassandra Analyzing Cassandra Performance with Flame Graphs Cassandra Time Series Data Modeling For Massive Scale Now the fun part - I’ve spent the last 3 years at Apple, then Netflix, neither of which gave me much time to continue my writing.
A SMALL UTILITY TO HELP WITH EXTRACTING CODE SNIPPETS
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. Part of the reason has been due to the writing I’ve done over on the blog at The Last Pickle. In the lsat few years, I’ve written about our tlp-stress tool, tips for new Cassandra clusters, and a variety of performance posts related to Compaction, Compression, and GC Tuning. The other reason is the eight blog posts I’ve got in the draft folder.
ENABLING KOTLIN 1.3'S SUPPORT FOR RETURNING RESULT IN STANDARD LIBRARY
Kotlin 1.3 was released recently. There’s a number of interesting changes. Coroutines have graduated from experimental, contracts, and inline classes have been useful in my own work so far. You can read about the changes on the Kotlin website There’s another feature I find very useful: the new Result type. I first used the Result Monad in Rust. I don’t write much Rust anymore, but I definitely appreciate the patterns that came from functional programming.
LVM BY EXAMPLE
In this post I’ll be discussing the fundamentals of the Logical Volume Manager in Linux, usually simply referred to as LVM. I’ve used LVM occasionally over the years, but for the most part I would just create a single big partition on my disk, toss XFS on it and call it a day. Recently that changed when I decided to replace my aging home media server with a new beast of a box that I wanted to do a lot more than simply serve up content.
ACCESSING PRIVATE VARIABLES IN THE JVM
In this I’ll discuss a uncommonly used but useful technique of accessing variables and methods which have been declared as private in the JVM, using the Apache Commons Lang library to work around the restriction. The description from the project page reads: The standard Java libraries fail to provide enough methods for manipulation of its core classes. Apache Commons Lang provides these extra methods. A couple weeks ago I was working on a project that required parsing some CQL statements.
MIGRATION TO HUGO
After almost five years of using Pelican as my static site generator, I’ve migrated to the Hugo tool. While I enjoyed Pelican and it’s flexibility, it’s performance started to bother me when building a site from scratch. Depending on what else was running on my laptop, a full build could take 15-20 seconds. This isn’t the end of the world, but in comparison Hugo takes less than 100 milliseconds. If it was simply a matter of build time, I may not have really cared that much, but I’ve been using Hugo to build the site and documentation for Reaper, the open source repair tool we maintain at The Last Pickle.