Our senior sysadmin, Nathan March, has been compiling some notes on MySQL and InnoDB for internal use, but we thought they might be of some use and interest to a broader audience. We’ve split Nathan’s insights up into three posts which we’ll be posting daily. First up, Nathan talks about the distinctions between MyISAM and InnoDB, two of MySQL’s storage engines:

I initially started writing this for sysadmins but thought it might be of use to programmers on the whole to help give some insight into MySQL’s storage engine, how they work and why they do certain things. Hopefully this will help demystify things a little on how InnoDB and replication work internally.

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Server monitoring is a vital part of Gossamer Threads’ hosting platform. Recently, we updated our Gossamer Eye monitoring system to keep up with the growth of our server racks. While we’d made plenty of modifications to that system to match growth in the past, we realised this time that we were passing a benchmark number of servers and needed a ground-up reconstruction of our monitoring system. Here’s how we rebuilt Gossamer Eye…

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Gossamer Threads is excited to announce that we’re now the hosting partner for the One Laptop Per Child project, a unique not-for-profit group dedicated to giving children in the developing world better access to education by designing and distributing unique, low-cost laptops. In addition to hosting OLPC, GT is helping them optimize their site performance and monitor server load. Learn more about this great organization after the cut.

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Aeroplan is Canada’s premier coalition loyalty program. Enabling millions of members to earn and redeem Aeroplan Miles, Aeroplan works with more than 75 partners in the financial, retail, and travel sectors. Aeroplan’s internal servers process approximately 6000 transactions every day, and an operation of this size needed a reliable and rock-solid hosting solution. In close collaboration with Aeroplan’s techs, Gossamer Host mapped out an extra-redundant server cluster custom-fitted for their internal operations.

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Venetubo is a video sharing site dedicated to Venezuelan news and content. The site has been developed using the Gossamer suite of products (Gossamer Community, Gossamer Forum and Gossamer Links), and is a great example of how extensively and productively these programs, especially GLinks, can be modified to develop nearly any kind of site!

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