Read the original article at A CTO Must Never Do This…
A couple years back I was contacted to look at a very strange problem.
The firm ran flash sales. An email goes out at noon, the website traffic explodes for a couple of hours, then settles back down to a trickle.
Of course you might imagine where this is going. During that peak, the MySQL database was brought to its knees. I was asked to do analysis during this peak load, and identify and fix problems. Make it go faster, please!
First day on the job I’m working with a team of outsourced DBAs. I was also working with a sort of swat team chatting on SKYPE, while monitoring the systems closely.
Then up popped one comment from a gentlemen I hadn’t worked with. He insisted there was contention for a little known MySQL resource called the AUTO_INC lock. Since I wanted to know more, I asked who the guy was and to my surprise he turned out to be the CTO.
Wow, that’s a first. I thought I’d seen it all. A CTO is normally overseeing technology & the team rather than crawling around in the trenches on the front line.
This all raised some important points
1. The app was having major growing pains
2. Current architecture was not scaling
3. Amazon elasticity was not helping at the database layer
4. People & process were also failing, hence the CTOs hands on approach
It was shocking to see a problem deteriorate to this point, but when you consider the context its understandable. A company like this is struggling with hypergrowth to such a degree, that each day seems like a hurricane storm. With emergency meetings, followed by hardware & application emergencies, trouble seems constant. It can be very difficult to step back and see the larger picture.
The takeaway from this experience…
o Amazon EC2 can’t do it all – consider physical servers for disk intensive apps
o MySQL still has some real scalability limitations
o use technology for its intended purpose – MySQL isn’t great for queueing
o A CTO tuning the database means problems have deteriorated too far
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