CMG 2007 Day 1: Sunday Workshops
The CMG Sunday workshops are an opportunity to get a more immersive and hands-on experience with Performance and Capacity Planning topics. Since it all happens before the official kickoff of the conference on Monday afternoon, it’s also a great way to get the jump on the other attendees.
In the morning, I attended a workshop by Adrian Cockcroft and Mario Jauvin called “Performance Management with Free and Bundled Tools”. They have actually presented this same workshop for several years now and its updated each year with the latest information on dozens of tools. It was this workshop in 2005 that led me to implement several open source tools and write my own paper about the experience which I’m presenting at this year’s CMG.
For the afternoon session I opted to sit in on Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s “How to Move Beyond Monitoring, Pretty Damn Quick!”. This was a very enlightening session for me because it discussed how to move from merely monitoring performance to modeling and predicting performance. Previously, I’ve looked at using statistical means of predicting performance such and there are obviously some drawbacks and limitations to this. Namely that statistics assume that response time will grow in a linear fashion. However, a computer system is really a circuit of queues and Queuing Theory tells us that it will be more like a hockey stick. PDQ is a an open source tool which allows you to build queuing models and use them to predict performance. For example, if my server farm has an average response time of 300ms with a load of 1,000 requests per second then what will performance look like at 6,000 requests per second? At what point does response time become unacceptable and I should add additional capacity? I’m looking forward to exploring this further once I get back home.
After the workshops, I set out to find someplace to dine that wasn’t terribly expensive and since I’m limited without a rental car and don’t want to take taxi, I decided to explore Seaport Village some more. At the far end, I found a place call the San Diego Burger Company. The price was more reasonable than other places in the area, but still expensive for a burger joint. However, it was definitely worth the price. The burger was great, but the onion rings as far from crispy as you can get.
On my way back to the hotel, I came across a unique site. A carousel inside of a building.
I realized as I was walking back to the hotel that because of the time zone change, my class assignments which are due at midnight EST would now be due two hours earlier here on the west coast than at home. I hope my professors will understand why I was an hour late turning in my assignment. I’m looking forward to a bit of relaxation and a chance to work on my paper since there’s nothing scheduled until Monday afternoon. It seems that Monday evening’s social/networking event is a harbor cruise which sounds fun.
Tags: sandiego, cmg2007, cmg, seaport village, performance, pdq, free, open source, san diego burger company