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In a lot of different kinds of systems there are moving parts.  Electronics, automobiles, bridges and even living systems.  As it turns out in many if not most of these systems, the simpler designs tend to have various advantages over the more complex designs.  These benefits ring true in the business world as well.

Rock Climbing

Take the extreme sport rock climbing as an example.  I’ve been rock climbing off and on for about five years, though mostly indoors at rock climbing gyms.  One thing that you learn a lot about in rock climbing is safety.  There is a discussion of the harness, and how to double-back the waist cinch, and using multiple carabiners to lock into the rope, and then how to tie the rope in such a way that it tightens as it bears weight.  Both the person climbing and the person balaying – gathering the rope below – each have to take care of these things.  So generally they both check their own rope, harness, carabiners, and then check the other persons.

With indoor climbing this is all rather simple, and with just six checks for each climber to make, generally quite safe.  Plus there are monitors in the room watching people climb, and further checking for mistakes or oversights.  So over the years I’ve heard of practically *no* injuries in the gym.  It is so-called top-roping, and their are few moving parts.

With outdoor climbing you can do top-roping, however more advanced climbers prefer lead climbing.  It is much more challenging, and as I’ve described above there are many more moving parts.  The lead climber has to place “protection” into the rock every few meters.  These are special camming devices that grip into the rock.  Obviously all these components are not fool-proof, hence you want to add as many as possible.  But there are limits to endurance, and statistical averages at play, and more importantly many more moving parts.  So unfortunately lead climbing outdoors although possible to be on the safe side, tends to be much more prone to accidents.  More moving parts increases the statistical chance of a system breakdown.

iPhone

Something similar is at play when it comes to interface design.  With user interface or UI design, there is often a discussion of how many steps it takes to perform a function.  The more steps, the deeper the function is hidden.  Fewer steps means simplicity of design.

The iphone is a great example of this.  By simplifying the user interface, the machine works better.  At the Mobile World Congress last year Google announced that they get 50 times more searches from the iphone than *any* other mobile device.  Fifty times!  Think about that statistic.  This is more that flashy glitz and a pretty package.  This is a device that has fewer moving parts, not only in terms of buttons, but in the virtual interface components that a user navigates on the touch screen.

Internet & Engineering

Many of the same truisms that apply in the examples of rock climbing or smartphones also apply to internet systems, and the operations side of the business.  Can we use a web-services solution such a mailchimp.com to handle our email newsletter?  That means less to manage in-house, so our IT staff can focus on more important tasks.  Or how about outsource all email handling through a service like google’s Gmail for Business, or salesforce.com for CRM.

Simplifying your operations can also mean going with managing hosting solution, or better yet embracing the cloud with Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud.   For that matter what database platform are you running on, or what computing platform?  Does it embrace the complexity and more  features philosophy?  Or does it strive for simplicity, and fewer moving parts?  And for that matter how many of those endless features are you actually using for your application?

Conclusion

As it turns out, engineers as much as business folks are wowed by endless features and the appeal of glitz and shine of a fancy new car.  But often in business what you need is reliability, simplicity, and fewer moving parts to get the job done, and get it done well.

Your website is slow but you’re not sure why.  You do know that it’s impacting your business.  Are you losing customers to the competition?

1. Gather Intelligence

With any detective work you need information.  That’s where intelligence comes in.  If you don’t have the right data already, install monitoring and trending systems such as Cacti and Collectd.  That way you can look at where your systems have been and where they’re going.

2. Identify Bottlenecks

Put all that information to use in your investigation.  Use stress testing tools to hit areas of the application, and identify which ones are most troublesome.  Some pages get hit A LOT, such as the login page, so slowness there is more serious than one small report that gets hit by only  a few users.  Work on the biggest culprits first to get the best bang for your buck.

3. Smooth Out the Wrinkles

Reconfigure your webservers to make more connections to your database, or spin-up more servers.  On the database tier make sure you have fast RAIDed disk, and lots of memory.  Tune queries coming from your application, and look at possible upgrades to servers.

4. Be Agile But Plan for the Future

Can your webserver tier scale horizontally?  Pretty easy to add more servers under a load balancer.  How about your database.  Chances are with a little work and some HA magic your database can scale out with more servers too, moving the bulk of select operations to read-only copies of your primary server, while letting it focus on transactions, and data updates.  Be ready and tested so you know exactly how to add servers without impacting the customers or application.  Don’t know how?  Look at the big guys like Facebook, an investigate how they’re doing it.

5. A Going Concern

Most importantly, just like your business, your technology infrastructure is an ongoing work in progress.  Stay proactive with monitoring, analysis, trending, and vigilance.  Watch application changes, and filter for slow queries.  Have new hardware or additional hardware dynamically at-the-ready for when you need it.

The analogy du jour for cleaning up the financial mess is that sunshine makes the best disinfectant.  The idea is to push for more corporate transparency as a cleaning agent upon our current financial troubles.   Whether this cleaning job will have longstanding impact remains to be seen, however it’s clear that transparency is good for markets and economic stability.

In computing that same sunshine can be put to work as a disinfectant as well.  Transparency is as important for your cloud hosted application or traditional servers alike.  So how does it work?

Your typical internet application consists of a whole fleet of servers working together to do work for you.  Unlike automobiles, bridges, buildings or even most electronics however, the construction is constantly changing.  In effect these are buildings that are always being built, and bridges always being expanded.  Due to their changing nature, their behavior changes as well.  That’s where transparency comes in.

There are a number of great historical data tools specifically designed to capture the myriad of different metrics on your servers and then analyze and graph that information for you offline.  We like offline because that means the monitoring itself won’t affect or impact the performance of your application and servers.  Some of the tools of choice today include Munin, Cacti, and Collectd.  They each have their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of installation, configurability and so forth.  What they all have in common though is the transparency they provide.

Once installed, they will begin happily collecting information and monitoring your servers, all day and all night long even while you are enjoying your sunday brunch.

Are you looking at an outage that you encountered yesterday at 11pm?  Did your customers have trouble ordering your products, or utilizing your service? Fire up your cacti graphs, and drill down to that time window, and then review the various metrics to see what they reveal.

Having the right information at your fingertips is the first step in being able to resolve troubles.  Only with the right information can you fix these problems, and serve your customers what they expect.  So follow the analogy of using sunshine as a disinfectant and shine some light into your complex cloud environments. Let transparency lead you to the root of the problem and clean it up before it touches your customers.

Book Review:  The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson

When I think back to the dot-com days, I recall euphoria in people’s eyes.  It was that excitement in the face of making boat loads of money off the stock market that I remember clearly.  It is the excitement of the gambler, the thought of taking the shortcut, of getting something for nothing.  I remember seeing that same look in people’s eyes when they talked about housing just a short few years ago.  Talk of flipping houses and making money without adding anything.

It’s after the bubble bursts that everyone starts to think clearly again.  The tide has receded and we are left wondering how there could be bathers who weren’t wearing bathing suits, while it’s now plain for all to see.

Niall Ferguson’s book chronicles money’s use through history both the good and the bad.  By putting the current financial mess into historical perspective, he offers us new insights into our current predicament, helping us chart the way forward.  For anyone wanting to understand the financial forces around us, this is definitely a book worth reading.

You’ve heard all about twitter, and you may have visited the website, or used it through other tools that bring your messages from linkedin or facebook into twitter.  It turns out there is a lot more to the twitter world that first meets the eye.

1. Make regular and relevant use of hashtags

2. Focus on your subject matter expertise

3. Monitor trends on google and twitter.com

4. Link to colleagues you respect and promote cross-pollination of networks.

5. Remember you are broadcasting, so word your tweets appropriate to your audience.

A friend and colleague of mine runs a small business doing internet consulting, programming, and services mostly for online magazines. We were talking about customers and clients, and the sometimes large disconnect there is between how we all perceive technology. He said something very insightful – “customers don’t know what they want, but they know what their NEEDS are”.

Story: Hosting an Email List

I used to host this very email list myself, using some open source software called phplist. It is very customizable, providing a lot of features and functionality, rivaling if not surpassing many of the pay services. So for five years I simply hosted the list myself.

I had a lot of problems though. I had problems with bounces being handled properly, and unsubscribes, and the tracking never worked very well. The reports which one relies on a lot to know what people read and find interesting and useful, were not setup in an ideal way either. Worst of all was the blacklist problem, as a lot of email services simply blacklist servers they don’t like. It then becomes very difficult to get off of those lists. So subsequent emails just end up in junkmail boxes, and people never see your newsletter. Furthermore there was a lot of administrative overhead for managing the software.

I recently moved to a hosted solution called Mail Chimp. I spent a lot of time comparing various services, but this one seemed to have very good customer service, and a lot of community support. After I sent out my first newsletter I found it integrated with google analytics, which was superb. It further would automatically post to twitter, had a wordpress plugin for integrating with a blog or website, and a whole host of other features I hadn’t even dug into yet.

I got all this for only $30/month, I gain the brains of all those people working to perfect the system, I gain the proessionalism that they enforce when I upload the list, better reports, more intelligence, and more readers! The whole experience was a learning one for me. I knew well what I needed, to reach customers, colleagues, and potential prospects. But clearly I didn’t know what I wanted.

The end result? I now can focus more on my business, my day-to-day needs, by getting it done RIGHT… Leave email list management to the experts!

Story: A Clogged Drain

For a while my bathroom sink has had this sort of slow drain problem. Probably off and on for about two years I’ve had the problem. Usually I’ll pour some draino down there and leave it for a few hours, and then rinse it with hot water. Even after these various times of cleaning it out, it never drained well, and within a few months it would always come back. Once it’s not draining, it starts to gunk up, a real pain in the neck.

So in effort to solve the problem, I went once again to the local grocery store. This time I really looked at the products on offer. Apparently there were FIVE different kinds of draino. I had never noticed, I just always bought the same one. Reading the labels closely, one was a gel, another a foam, another a liquid one, and a fourth was extra strength. On the back of one of the labels there was a table describing the different types of clogs and which product would be best. Apparently I had a slow recurring drain. It turns out that was a known TYPE of clog. I didn’t know there were different types of clogged drains.

I ended up with the foam draino which seemed to be the one for a slow recurring drain. I followed the instructions, and poured the entire contents down the drain as instructed. I waited an hour or so, and ran the hot water down the drain. Low and behold it was clear, more clear than it had been in a couple of years. Wow!

Now I’m not a plumber, obviously, it’s not my specialty. I had no idea how complex the subject was, nor the variety of solutions available. I didn’t even know what my problem was. But I knew what my needs were. I knew I wanted my drain cleared. I assumed it was a simple fix, and it shouldn’t cost more that $5 or $10, but then I had the problem for two years. In retrospect it probably would have been worth hiring a plumber for $100 or $150 to fix the problem right, and have a clear sink for two more years than I did.

The recurring problem may inflict more pain than the cost of resolving the problem properly, promptly, and with no fuss, without requiring me to master new subject matter, so I can get on with other business at hand.

Conclusions

We all know what our day-to-day needs our, in business, and in life. But we don’t always know what we want. We turn to subject matter experts in various areas to provide us with their knowledge, their experience, and allow us to focus on our core businesses.

Book Review – What Every Body Is Saying – Joe Navarro

Ever been in a meeting with a colleague, client, or boss. You’re discussing some issue which needs resolution. You can sense the temperature is rising but you’re not sure why? Maybe you are already at the point where things are reaching a boiling point, and wondering when they got there and how?

Joe Navarro’s book takes a fascinating peak into body language, to help us better understand our own and those around us. Keep your hands in plain view if you want to be trusted, keep smiling, and keep and open mind. There is a lot to learn in this book. Navarro is an ex-FBI agent, with years of experience at telling the good guys from the bad, the liars from the just plain nervous. So his views and perspectives are sure to be insightful, whether you want to work better with your colleagues, get that big promotion, or close a deal with a new prospect.

View What Every Body Is Saying on Amazon

1. Convert to Wordpress
2. Categorize and tag your content.
3. Use Google Analytics
4. Create new content regularly
5. Create a sitemap.xml

Wordpress

This popular blogging software has evolved into a full featured content management system.  Most types of businesses could host on wordpress, although they’d typically require a designer to layout a theme which matches your businesses requirements.

The advantage is huge.  Wordpress has evolved lockstep with the internet, and has integrated SEO right into the engine.  So your content will be very search engine friendly out of the box.

Categorize and Tag

This allows helps the search engines understand your material.  Remember these are software algorithms that read or “crawl” your site.  So they aren’t intelligent, and can make mistakes about what your content is about.  By providing specific tags, you help put your material in the right places, and have it indexed better by the search engines.

Use Google Analytics

This free service is a phenomenal way to see what’s happening on your site everyday, and what content is popular.  You can view hits, and where they’re coming from, and what search terms they used to find your site.

For an even more powerful tool and real-time analytics check out Chart Beat.

Create New Content

Adding new content regularly keeps your site fresh, and the search engines will notice this.  As more content is added, it will also allow the search engines to better categorize what types of content is there.  The more relevant content there is, the more the search engines will decide you are a good place to send their searchers.

Create a Sitemap

This is a map you give to the search engines so they can easily find all the pages in your site.  Without it they may only find pages linked from the homepage.  Wordpress has an easy plugin which builds this for you.  No mess, no trouble.

What is your strongest suit?

I talk to a lot of clients, prospects, and human resources folks everyday.  Every so often I’ll be asked “What is your strongest suit?  Would you say you are stronger in Oracle or MySQL?  You’re really on the database side, so you don’t do much systems administration, right?”   I hesitate to go with an either or answer because my exposure to technologies really has been mixed.  It’s easy to think in either or terms.  You can’t be expert at both database platforms, can you?  A lot of folks do specialize in one platform, or one type of work so it’s not surprising we tend to compartmentalize without thinking about it.

What about a jack of all trades?

Perhaps a better question to be asking is how many hats can you wear?  A generalist who can deep dive into the details when necessary can be a great asset to a business.   A manager who is watching costs, and a tight budget needs resources who can solve a lot of different types of problems, and hiring folks who wear a lot of different hats can be a great asset to them.

Specializing Job Roles

Unfortunately due to the way we think of education, we normally major in one thing, and further specialize through years of on-the-job experience.  This type of focus is important, but it can also be a detriment.  Psychologists argue that we naturally have mental blind spots.  Because of that we tend to bias heavily to what we are most exposed to, and see things with those glasses.

Take for example if we specialize in a particular programming language, we’ll likely see that as the best solution for all tasks.  If our job is on the operations side, we may see the business and it’s application in terms of the components and servers that host it.  We probably think about security, and performance, and reliability.  And if we are a developer, we’ll see it as a series of software components that interact in a certain way.  We may well focus on functionality, and the details therein, but think less about performance or upkeep of those infrastructure that sits on.  If we’re a manager or CEO, we will see the business as a whole and what solution it brings to it’s customers.  We are intimately aware of costs in human resources, infrastructure, and day-to-day operations that it takes to make the business continue to move forward and grow.  However we may not understand the intimate details enough to notice a design flaw a developer might, or understand the security implications to the business of a certain infrastructure decision.

The forest for the trees

Given all of this we can see how pervasive each of our blind spots are, and how they influence our frame of mind.  It’s very easy for us to miss the forest for the trees unless we are vigilant.  Communication can help us, and goes a long way towards helping the business as a whole be able to do this.  It can’t hurt to also have a few generalists who can wear many different hats, and plug in to projects in different and creative ways for the business.

BOOK REVIEW:  Cordelia Fine – A Mind of It’s Own, How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

Here’s an interesting read that elaborates and clarifies how we are biased, how our minds tell us convenient fictions everyday.  Most people are overly optimistic, for instance about their driving ability, or their chances of success.  She explains that this is exhibited by healthy minds, and that there are a class of people that actually see things closer to reality.  Their perceptions of themselves are more even, and their predictions tend to be more realistic.  Apparently people with this unusual quality tend to be clinically depressed.

She divides the chapters up into some of our favorite vices, vanity, immorality, delusions and further being over emotional, secretive, weak-willed or bigoted.  Whatever areas are our particular trouble spots, we all exhibit some of these traits at times.

The author goes a long way towards explaining how and why we do this, and what can be done to improve the situation.  With her insights in mind we can hopefully make better decisions, and communicate better with those around us.

View A Mind of It’s Own on Amazon

The Business

A website aggregating twitter feeds for celebrities, with sophisticated search functionality.

The Problem

Having been recently acquired by a large media and entertainment conglomerate, their traffic had already tripled.  What’s more they expected their unique pageviews to grow by 20 to 30 times in the coming six months.

Our Process

We worked closely with the lead architect and designer of the site to understand some of the technical difficulties they were encountering.  We discussed key areas of the site, and where performance was most lacking.

Next we reviewed the underlying infrastructure with an eye for misconfigurations, misuse of or badly allocated resources, and general configuration best practices.  They used Amazon EC2 cloud hosted servers for the database, webserver, and other components of the application.

The Solution

Our first round of reviews spanned a couple of days.  We found many issues with the configuration which could dramatically affect performance.  We adjusted settings in both the webserver, and the database to optimally maximize the platform upon which they were hosted.  These initial changes reduced the load average on the server from a steady level of 10.0 to an average of 2.0.

Our second round of review involved a serious look at the application.  We worked closely with the developer to understand what the application was doing.  We identified those areas of the application causing the heaviest footprint on the server, and worked with the developer to tune those specific areas.  In addition we examined the underlying database structures, tables and looked for relevant indexes, adding those as necessary to support the specific requirements of the application.

After this second round of changes, tweaks, adjustments, and rearchitecting, the load average on the server was reduced dramatically, to a mere 0.10.  The overall affect was dramatic.  With 100 times reduction in the load on the server, the websites performance was snappy, and very responsive.  The end user experience was noticeably changed.  A smile comes on your face when you visit your favorite site, to find it working fast and furious!

Results

The results to the business were dramatic.  Not only were their short term troubles addressed, as the site was handling the new traffic without a hick up.  What’s more they had the confidence and peace of mind now to go forward with new advertising campaigns, secure in the knowledge that the site really could perform, and handle a 20 to 30 times increase in traffic with ease.

The Business

A location based nightlife and entertainment company built on mobile smartphone platforms.

The Problem

The website was sluggish, and performance of the mobile applications were running slowly.

Process

We worked closely with the CTO and development team, discussed sticking points focusing on relevant areas of application and infrastructure.  We drilled down to the different components of the application, such as the network, cloud hosting (amazon EC2), webservers, load balancers, and backend database.

We identified that the heaviest components were the complex mechanisms and code used to calculate location itself.  Since this was an integral part of the service, users’ mobile devices would use GPS, identify their locations, and search the database for relevant venues and information around them.

Solution Options

We identified two possible solutions, one short term and one long term.

1. Apply an advanced database indexing strategy which specifically addresses location based information.  By utilizing this technology, we would eliminate and vastly simplify the code being used to search for venues and information based on location.  Being the central component to the application, this would provide a dramatic boost in performance.
2. Build a completely new and streamlined solution to the location searching functionality, by using square location areas, instead of the more intuitive circular location area.  Since users really just want information about venues around them, they likely don’t have a specific, precise, or mathematical idea of what “around” means.  Therefore a more loose definition can lend itself much better to computer database storage, and subsequent indexing of information.

Results

By implementing the short term plan, and performing further benchmarks, the business was able to release it’s new mobile application on the blackberry carousel store.  They were featured in the carousel store, highlighted as a new business bursting with exciting features and technology.  As a featured application, they received huge spike in volume of ten times their previous average.

With the changes put in place, they sailed through this challenging period smoothly, and with confidence that their application was performing beautifully.

Their long term rollout of the more general high speed solution has been an even greater success, ironing out remaining bottlenecks, and allowing the application to scale and grow rapidly as their mobile user and customer base  expands.

Looking for a top-flight MySQL DBA to help tune or troubleshoot your application?  You’ve come to the right place.  At Heavyweight Internet Group we have fourteen years experience identifying bottlenecks in your services and systems, and resolving intractable problems.  We tune, optimize and rearchitect your application as necessary, to deliver you a better site.  One that performs better, and handles all of your customers as your business grows.