Abdullah’s Blog

Drupal is different, I got lucky to try drupal on nice heavy traffic website http://www.almoslim.net, which gave me the chance to try drupal to the limit. Unfortunately, I found drupal by default was not design to cater high traffic websites. You need to put something more to tune or some wrong behaviors you might encounter.
Ok get this, Drupal with the current Mysql MyISAM tables will lead you to fragmented tables which will make your tables crashes depending on the traffic you have on your side. Of course this might happen to any application that handles heavy traffic website using MyISAM.
The nature of Drupal is to collect the much information they can from every visitor, Drupal tends to write the activities of every users and that leads to read and write at the same time from many users. Tada!!, READING AND WRITING means locking the whole tables for every single write!! so to complete the formula put it in high traffic website. Congratulations, you will experience Deadlocks and tables fragmentation.
It’s not drupal fault to have it by default MyISAM, it’s my fault that it didn’t click in my mind from the beginning that I need to have some MySQL Database tuning.
Nevertheless, I reviewed all drupal’s tables, and started to convert all of heavy write and read tables to InnoDB engine which finally solved the problem.

I enabled Query Caching again and started to enjoy the High Speed query results again

To enhance the performance in almoslim.net, we decided to enable MySQL Query Caching. The result and cache hits were very good number, but since we started with MySQL 5.1.22, tables were getting crash from time to time.
I couldn’t help more than a cron job running everyday to repair crashed tables. Recently, I got some tables which were not possible to repair and the only solution for them is to drop and create the table again. So I realized that I have to find a real solution or stop using Query Caching.

Today, I stopped the Query Caching after weeks of search and trying to find what is wrong. It seems that MySQL Query Cache need to revised or may be we have some special activities in almoslim.net database that does trigger a bug.

Telephony switching started from Analog and different digital trials to IP layer switchs ( Soft switch ) and finally landing in IMS.
IP multimedia subsystem(IMS) starts to boost as a concept and new step for the true generation of communication. The concept based on many objective to achieve, but for me I believe it’s only one concept: The Telephony companies understand that if we don’t go for well structured with very good interoperability, we will not be able to compete Skype and different proprietaries businesses. and to prove that we saw that Skype and others start to build telephone hardware that are compatible with their systems.

So, 3GPP decided to make it real and to put everything on the table and prove that if internet can cross the international borders using different IP layer technologies, we can still compete them with the well structured design that provides the best QoS and services with open interoperability.

Of course there are many other reasons, such as IP layer will give the telephony convergence the ability to serve the customer no mater what access medium he is using. I can call my friend while my telephone is at home connected through my FTTH, and my friend’s phone were connected through his company service provider ( his office wifi lan ). and later he decided to get out of the office and continue the conversation with me using the WiMax coverage.

By this way, the service providers will have two separate things to worry about, the access and the telephony. and by the time we will see some service provider coming to the market without any access technologies but with telephony, and it will be your responsibility to find the better access provider for you ( for mobility , and for home) because your telephony does not care about the access, it cares only about IP layer connectivity!

20 years back, people were enjoying talking using their Mobiles and experiencing the good success stories of Voice mobility communication and we kept the same level of technology with some new little introduction of different additional services such as SMS and MMS. Now with IMS new services and technologies can be provided and it’s all mixed now… Your faxes messages reach to your email because you configured your fax to forward the fax to your email. you don’t want to call your friend now because the face on your Contact list in front of his name shown ( presence ) that he is in a meeting just like MSN messenger!. You want to have different profiles of your phone , if you are at your office you have good internet connection so Video calls is possible , if you are at home with poor internet connection only voice calls , in your mobile you want only the text messages!!. Moreover, You have 2 phones connected one in your hand , another at your office and you don’t want to worry if you get the call or not because the system will do hunting or ONLY services will let the call reach to you no mater what telephony set you are using…

So IMS is good, so let’s wait for Middle east companies to have it deployed after 50 years!!.

Want to know more about IMS? Ericsson is the best. Go read this white paper it’s the best ever I read about IMS for non-deep tech.