Yes, the growth in the webspace can be partly attributable to programming being more stable, more accessible to beginners. Do you think the hard part of any programming/engineering project is learning a new language?
Let me try to answer: Slow - as in average Top loads (on CentOS) staying between 1 and 2 pretty much throughout the day; closer to 2 rather than to 1, peaking ALL the way up to 10 and even beyond several times a day, for periods as long as 15 to 30 minutes.
Do you have some other measurements? slow_log, queries without indexes, low key cache usage? Load is just one metric and can be very deceiving. Do you have any backup system which hits the disks at the same time, batch jobs, or something similar? Depending on your workload, "load" can vary - it just means the writes are being queued up.
It's definitely not a good sign, but try to get more specific. I've seen servers doing heavy network I/O with "normal" load over 5 times the number of cores.
Also, unless you're doing loads of selects and very few modifications, you could gain a lot by switching to InnoDB, or XtraDB, rather than MyISAM.
Have to second this. You should monitor load for sure... but depending on how many cores you are running a load of 1 or 2 could be absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Personally, the most important metric for us is average query response time.
Additionally as others have stated where you can use memcache or some other key/value store you should be working on implementing that.
The spike to 10+ sounds like it might be io blocking rather than CPU (which would be stuff like queries). If you look at your time wait (%wa) in top, and the output of iostat, you should be able to get an idea. If you're on VPS systems with older SATA drives that could be the bottle neck. If the Kernel is waiting for the disk(s) to be able to write more data to the storage bus/buffers it will block the storage process which will result in blocking for any application trying to access storage. As more and more processes block they'll go into poll/sleep loops and all those instructions will seem to spike the CPU load and make the CPU look busy even if the CPU is just sitting there saying "storage is still busy" over and over again. You probably have 1.00 to 2.00 true CPU load (queries, etc) which isn't that bad. But, you generally want to keep your CPU load below 1.00/per cpu. Otherwise, there is CPU level blocking. If you were swapping a lot (which you can also tell from top) that would aggravate and storage subsystem overloading. I would just post the output from top and iostat during one of the spikes here and see what people say rather than hiring an expensive consultant. You could probably find an experienced sysadmin to look at it as a favor, as well. They should be able to tell you quickly if you really need someone to look at your MySQL and app code to address this. Or, if you just need to add more nodes to your MySQL cluster (or look at something else like a NoSQL type setup).
Good read: this story has nothing to do with programming but everything to do with overcoming the loss of extrinsic rewards and putting yourself somewhere where your mindset and personality fits best
We have to ask ourselves: where is the money? Our rights aren't being lost to a sprawling military-police state just because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution. Police departments grow the same way our project departments grow in engineering companies: by managers arguing for bigger budgets and spending more, sometimes wastefully, to justify bigger budgets come next fiscal year.
These hyped-up (sometimes roided-up) SWAT teams do what they do to justify their existence....no manager wants to preside over a shrinking department. It takes a lot of thinking and long-term policy making to reduce this perverse yet basic economic incentive
Don't forget all the war-on-terror funding and politics that have provided even rural police departments with armored personnel carriers and the like.[1] Or outfitting police departments with tons of equipment in advance of protests planned there which then filters down into daily use. In some cities, there is so little for the "anti-terror" cops to do that they have been conscripted into arresting drunk people and pot smokers.[2]
There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law enforcement mindset.
A lot of the funding comes from seizures of cars, houses, cash, anything that can be grabbed. Then it's up to the citizen to "prove" it isn't ill-gotten goods.
I don't have any figures for local municipalities, but US Attorneys have been pretty prosperous. In 2010, the seizure total for the Feds was over $1 billion.
Calling it a failure ignores the actual goals of a bureaucracy: consolidation and centralization of power.
In that regard it's been a roaring success because there has never been such a tight and unified cooperation between the three branches of government (executive, judicial, legislative), between congress and the White House, between government and private industry, between our surveillance agency and foreign surveillance agencies, and so forth.
If there's anything to glean from this entire fiasco it's that a global world order has indeed been quietly established, and the rumblings in the EU will undermine it. Expect the US' allies to start publicly picking sides as the USG starts spending political capital.
What I'm seeing is an extreme centralization with the goal of projecting extreme power on the outside, while neglecting - worse - working against the citizen on the inside.
The U.S. and Russia are still large strategic and economic partners. There's other political balls being juggled around, like the ongoing conflict in Syria. It's not necessarily "leverage"
Inasmuch as plus has actually caused Google to better-integrate some of its services [1] it can be quite convenient.
Unfortunately, that convenience is often paired with bad default privacy options and seemingly-impossible-to-stop annoyances. [2]
[1] Compare youtube integration vs the various clumsy half-measures they've taken since the acquisition. Or consider chrome/google+ bookmark sync'ing vs the various iGoogle bookmark situation and plugins and half-measures.
[2] a.) the emails google continues to send me, recommending people i may want to add to my circles. b.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they inserted into my google+ 'timeline'-thing, back when i was actively trying to use it. I turned that off, at least once. But after a few weeks, it just magicked itself back on. c.) the nonsense 'popular' post crap they email to me every few months.
The battle is not the war. You can be entrenched because you started 20+ years ago when nothing better was available and haven't improved since, but when new competition springs up to replace your anachronistic dung, you've got a whole new fight for the future on your hands.
Since you asked, the ones that jumped out at me were: "aweful" (should be "awful") "freckin" (should be "freaking", though that might have been deliberate) and "lifes" (should be "lives").
Does your CMS not allow you to use spell check? Most modern browsers support spell check in forms, so it shouldn't require explicit support. Even if you're pounding out HTML manually, all the HTML editors I've seen recently have spell checking support.
