Author Archives: mzarate

NetBeans is Slow on Ubuntu 10.10 – Switch Your JDK

NetBeans can be slow, very slow.  After trying out everything on the NetBeans Performance FAQ to no avail, I finally reached the point where I decided to switch to another IDE instead of trying to manage NetBeans’ performance problems.  Before … Continue reading

Posted in General, Performance | 2 Comments

MySQL – WordPress & Avoiding unneeded Group By clauses

A client recently reached out in regard to a reproducible performance problem on their WordPress site.  The use case and conditions were as follows: Performance was fine until a change happened to the wp_posts or wp_term_relationships tables (i.e. when a … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Performance | Leave a comment

MySQL – inner join vs. exists() may yield better performance

Here’s another example of why it’s always a good idea to refer to execution plans and test different query options.  Here’s a query I was running as part of some manual data work: SELECT ua.* FROM vn_user_achievements ua WHERE EXISTS … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Performance | Leave a comment

MySQL – Got error 28 from storage engine

Just after a late night deployment I received this error message while running queries against the production database I just deployed to: Got error 28 from storage engine query I could connect to the database fine, but any database query … Continue reading

Posted in Database | 1 Comment

Magento: There was an error processing your request

I recently jumped into a Magento project and, while setting everything up in my local environment, I encountered the following error when I hit the index page: “There has been an error processing your request. Exception printing is disabled by … Continue reading

Posted in General | Leave a comment

PlainCart login problem, and why are they still on MySQL versions < 4.1?

A client shot me an email asking for help w/a PlainCart installation he’s trying to setup. The symptom was that the supposed login credentials of admin, admin weren’t working. Reproducing the problem was simple enough, going to the login page … Continue reading

Posted in Database, General | Leave a comment

Ubuntu 10.10: Installing XDebug and KCacheGrind with PHP 5

After doing a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 install I spent some time re-installing some much relied on dev tools, 2 of which are XDebug and KCacheGrind. Their purpose is to add enhanced debugging and profiling capabilities to any dev environment. If … Continue reading

Posted in Performance, PHP | 2 Comments

PHPUnit in Kohana 2.3.4

I wanted to add unit test support to a current Kohana 2.3.4 project I’m working on.  Unfortunately, most of the posts I found on how to integrate unit testing into Kohana were for version 3.x, not 2.3.x.  The few hits … Continue reading

Posted in PHP | 3 Comments

Some Numbers Regarding Latency and Geolocation

This won’t uncover anything most people familiar with server latency already know:  latency increases as the distance to a given server increases.  This post isn’t much more than that, except that there are numbers and data attached to supplement that … Continue reading

Posted in Performance | Leave a comment

MySQL: Index Column Order Matters

I was recently asked about whether column order matters in composite indexes, and if so, to what extent.  I recall this being the case when working with SQL Server 2000 and 2005, so I became curious how MySQL handled scenarios … Continue reading

Posted in Database | Leave a comment