MySQL is a widely used opensource DB. So it is vital for services to find some info in a very short period to sustain a huge load of requests, in case of many users. If your’re using MySQL and your application accesses records of the tables using mostly primary keys, it should be worth to consider buffering primary keys, which can be done by MySQL. This makes accessing records using primary keys (which most should do) run much faster. By typing the “show variables” command in mysql mode, you can see the list of variables together with their values. Take a look at the following ones:

key_read_requests – this is the total number of requests making use of an index
key_reads – this is the total number of requests that had to be read to disk

When you divide key_read_requests / key_reads, the ratio should be higher than 100 to 1. The higher it is the better will be the performance of accessing the records of a table using primary keys. To adjust this, increase the key_buffer_size. Typical rule of thumb is to take your system memory and multiply by .25. Some example values are 768M on a system with 3GB and 16M on a system with 64M.

Today we got 2000^th signup user! Signup rate is an increasing trend and we hope not only because the service is free but also because of the advanced features we are providing. Although the service is still beta and we keep adding new features, we are receiving very positive and encouraging feedback from the users. Number of tests we are performing for our users exceeds 11000. There are MAAANY new features under development and some already under beta testing by a selected group of our users. Our goal is to deliver more features while we are on beta stage, and keep working in parallel on increased  stability of the service.

New Netvibes mon.itor.us module is now available. It allows to see latest snapshoot for all your network test results from different monitoring locations conveniently within Netvibes desktop. You only need to click on the button bellow to get the module in your personal Netvibes.

Then you will get the module on Netvibes. You need to login using your mon.itor.us credentials and you will see something like:

Before 2 other widgets were available – one for Personal Google (see our previous blog post) and one for WordPress blog server (see a post).

the long waited support for Safari browser is already ready, so you can start using mon.itor.us with your Safari browser. In the same time the issues related to charts in IE7 also had been resolved in this version.

Recent posts at famous Max Limpag’s blog http://max.limpag.com/2006/11/09/media-temple-delivers-uptime-promise/ and http://max.limpag.com/2006/08/15/compare-web-hosting-providers/ show interesting trend – using mon.itor.us to check ISP to select the best one. Here is a fragment from his post: “Many hosting providers have claims of “99.9% uptime guarantee.” I don’t know if they actually meet this performance level but there is an easy and automated way to check for the performance of sites hosted in their servers. For the monitoring, use mon.itor.us, a free distributed website monitoring service.”

So before signing a contract with an ISP to rent a server you can watch its performance over some time and see if the ISP’s claimed uptime and performance is real and you will make better choice then.

Please take a look at the following blog post More New Features from Mon.itor.us