Jeromakay

I’m busy today migrating files and settings from one machine to another plus sorting out some things which suppose to help Loopthing grow easier.

So far, we’re ON for finding the right investor to provide us with seed capital while code development is moving forward at a faster pace than last week. (there will be an update on this, soon)

These are the updates for now, keep an eye on my Twitter page for faster updates.

I’ve got my lesson learned today while working on a major MySQL based feature for Loopthing. While everything was planned and coded carefully, it seems that one issue got carried away in production mode where things didn’t go just right obviously.

The end result was a slow or non-responsive application. I never though it could be the database system until checking the system’s usage statistics and realizing that mysqld was using over 190% of the CPU power.

This was crazy and unexplainable but what I’m about to reveal now doesn’t have anything to do with database optimization practices, but rather with design practices.  Here’s what happened:

I am a true believer that premature optimization is the mother of all evil (Donald Knuth), after learning it the hard way. The problem now stands in the opposite of this: not optimizing things sufficiently enough: what I did was to put together all my tables structure, setting up the main indexes, and nothing more.

Built my queries around this basic structure, tested on small amounts of data, but then, forgot to fine tune things and see where potential indexes are needed. This was totally forgotten in development code as well, and everything was one day migrated into production.

When production activity started growing things changed and the ugly face of poor queries optimization and index setting was revealed to us here. Geesh.

Now, if your CPU’s cycling like crazy, it’s time to have a look over your db’s structure once again, maybe you’ve “missed” to consider some very important things you always knew you must not be careful not to miss.

On the other hand, there’s a pro of my issue today: it prevented useless hours of premature optimization and benchmarking, LOL