Simon Willison’s Weblog

Bees with machine guns! Low-cost, distributed load-testing using EC2. Great name for a useful project—Bees with machine guns is a Fabric script which fires up a bunch of EC2 instances, uses them to load test a website and then spins them back down again. 11:04 pm

Using MySQL as a NoSQL—A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server. Very interesting approach: much of the speed difference between MySQL/InnoDB and memcached is due to the overhead involved in parsing and processing SQL, so the team at DeNA wrote their own MySQL plugin, HandlerSocket, which exposes a NoSQL-style network protocol for directly calling the low level MySQL storage engine APIs—resulting in a 7.5x performance increase. 11:10 pm