Dr. Christopher Kunz

During the WebTech 2006 conference, I had the chance to look at the rather new (May ‘06) O’Reilly book “Building Scalable Web Sites” by Yahoo’s Cal Henderson. I bought it and read thru some of the chapters in the airplane back from Sofia. Turns out it was a pretty good buy. The author clearly shows expertise in all kinds of scaling (vertically, horizontally and probably even diagonally, with your eyes closed, while being tortured by tiny little BSD devils) and outlines proper approaches as well as handy tools for the admin and developer.

There is even a lot of code in there, mostly to show where bottlenecks are, how to find them and how Flickr solved them, creating more scalable PHP code and in the long run, a more scalable web site. He points out that for the huge masses of photos they have to store, they actually invented their own storage protocol, mitigating some problems they had with FTP and SCP.

While there’s probably something in that book for every administrator and web developer, I’d like to point your attention to a very neat little CLI tool Cal presents. It’s called “Slurm” (web site or apt-get install slurm) and it basically gives you a real-time graph of your network interfaces’ current thruput. Nice for seeing what happens on a box, without having to wait for your RRDTool graphs to update. See the screenshot below.

All in all, very nice book so far and well worth the money. You should buy it.