Updated: September 16th, 2012

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to bookmark this page and return to it later when the fires have been put out.

Update 06/21/09: I think I've got the situation …

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Updated: July 30th, 2021

imageDuring my day-to-day activities, I use the Bash shell a lot. My #1 policy is to optimize the most frequently used activities as much as possible, so I’ve compiled these handy bash shortcuts and hints (tested in SecureCRT on Windows and Konsole on Linux). The article only touches on the default bash mode – emacs, not vi. If you haven’t specifically assigned your shell mode to vi (set –o vi), you’re almost certainly using the emacs mode. Learn these and your shell productivity will skyrocket, I guarantee it.

Update #1: In response to a few people saying this list is too short and “[he] could've added something to it, to at least make it look longer” (quote from one of

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Updated: July 30th, 2021

The Idea

imageFor the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

  • it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
  • I needed to have the easiest
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14

MySQL Slave Lag (Delay) Explained And 7 Ways To Battle It


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on September 5th, 2008 in Databases, Programming

Updated: September 16th, 2012

http://forge.mysql.com/w/images/1/1e/Dolphin_Laptop_cropped-386x222.jpgSlave delay can be a nightmare. I battle it every day and know plenty of people who curse the serialization problem of replication. For those who are not familiar with it, replication on MySQL slaves runs commands in series – one by one, while the master may run them in parallel. This fact usually causes bottlenecks. Consider these 2 examples:

  • Between 1 and 100 UPDATE queries are constantly running on the master in parallel. If the slave IO is only fast enough to handle 50 of them without lagging, as soon as 51 start running, the slaves starts to lag.
  • A more common problem is when one query takes an hour to run (let's say, it's an UPDATE with a
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21

Best MySQL Server Under $10K?


Posted by Artem Russakovskii on June 11th, 2008 in Databases

Updated: January 4th, 2009

Server picture I want to get opinions from outside of my daily circle of people on the best server hardware to use for MySQL. I remember from the conference somebody (Pipes?) mentioning a particular Dell server with multiple disk RAID10 that could supposedly be had for about $6k but I completely misplaced the model number (Frank, did you get my email?).

I know that a multi-disk RAID array with a bunch of fast disks (15k RPM?) is probably the most important method of improving performance, followed by the amount of RAM, so I'm trying to find the best combination/balance of the two. However, server prices on the Internet range so much that I don't even know where to begin to tell a …

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Updated: July 30th, 2021

When I was working in Radioshack 8 years ago, I remember selling the newest craze: gigantic wireless headphones that were awkward and bulky. The only thing you could do with them is pose as the Verizon guy, running around screaming "can you hear me now?" If you stood at the wrong angle to the receiver, the signal cut out, or even worse, terrible interference turned the most patient people into fiery monsters. I suppose the quality and size of wireless headphones improved over time but they're still unusable in real life because they're completely immobile.

giant-wireless-assphones

Recently Logitech released a bunch of semi-compromises, like these FreePulse loop-around headphones for $79.99 with a questionable rating and OK reviews, mostly due to crappy …

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