WordPress, which is the blogging platform used to run this site, relies on PHP and MySQL to operate. A while back, Sun bought MySQL, and then Oracle subsequently bought Sun. Two of the most important pieces of that second acquisition were MySQL, and the Java programming language. Without getting into too much of the debates, many people feel that Oracle isn’t a great steward for either Java or MySQL. To that end, the original creator of MySQL forked the code and created an alternative called MariaDB. MariaDB aims to be a seamless drop in replacement for MySQL, with better performance and some extended features. I decided to see how “drop in” it really was by updating this site to use it.
using strace on multiple processes in linux
My distinguished and decidedly sexy colleague Josh Barratt recently noted that you can use multiple -p flags with strace in order to simultaneously attach to multiple process. This is very useful when you’re trying to debug something like Nginx where there are likely multiple child processes that you want to monitor. If this is something that you think you might find useful, here’s a bash snippet that will make an easy to use straceall command: function straceall { strace $(pidof “${1}” | sed ‘s/\([0-9]*\)/-p \1/g’) } Just put this in your .bashrc, and then you can easily monitor a family of processes with a command such as: straceall php5-fpm if you’re trying to debug say a PHP issue.