[ILUG] Re: unison

[John McCormac]

kevin lyda wrote:
> 
> John McCormac wrote:
> > While MySQL and PHP can produce excellent results in the right hands,
> > the current set up would falter if it gets any serious traffic. The
> 
> /. gets serious traffic, yes?  they use mysql.

No. Not even close to the kind of site that I am talking about. Unison
aims to be a complete portal site. Slashdot is essentially specialist
and I would not be surprised if Slashdot had switched to a more robust
database. Wasn't there some discussion about the delay in the release
for the slashdot source a while ago?

On a portal site, there would have to be facilities for e-commerce and
credit card processing among other things. Now MySQL is fine for sites
like Slashdot but this is one kind of application where MySQL would not
be a good solution due to its lack of transactions.

> the net is full of exceptions to this "rule."  one could equally argue
> that solaris is better then linux for serious portal sites, but the fact
> is that a portal site isn't going to make heavy demands on a server or

Portal sites tend to make good use of the hardware. The ideal situation
for any database would be that the complete data set is stored in memory
rather than the harddrive. One of the critical failings of a lot of the
wannabe portals is that they run their dbs on machines with not enough
RAM. MySQL is a very nice fast database (I am experimenting with a
search engine spider/preprocessor using MySQL/tcl) and I think that one
of the aspects that makes it fast is that the datasets used on many of
the MySQL dbs are small enough easily loaded into a desktopish amount of
RAM (64MB - 256MB).

> db if it's designed correctly (s/w and system).  mysql can well surpass
> oracle in terms of speed in the subset of things that it can do.

The key point here is "subset". The lack of subqueries and transactions
can hamper the use of MySQL in some portal applications. Apache + PHP +
MySQL is fine for smallish portals but when it comes to heavily used
ones where a lot of database traffic would be occurring simultaneously,
other solutions such as AOLserver/Oracle are better because they require
fewer open database connections to achieve the results. (There is a very
good explanation of this in Philip Greenspun's article on
Oracle/AOLserver on the Linuxworld site or in his Database Backed
Websites book at http://photo.net/wtr/ ) The number of connections open
to the database would be the critical aspect of such a design and
AOLserver wins on this.
 
> not updating software properly is an indictment of the admin staff, not
> the software itself.  i'm not a php fan, but i won't knock it because
> patches weren't applied or it wasn't used properly.

I am not knocking PHP - read the text again. I am saying that the Unison
implementation leaves itself open to abuse.

Regards...jmcc
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John McCormac            * Hack Watch News
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