yukes.com >> Lazy Jay

You know what memcached is, right?

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

PHP has long had memcached support… but its weak… and still has fairly basic issues (I have an open bug – consistent hashing algorithm broken)  Also, it isn’t compatible with the MySQL UDF memcached functions, or command line tools!

One of MySQL’s top dogs — Brian Aker — built libmemcached… a C/C++ library that found its way into Ruby, Python and Perl. All except PHP!

Until now! A new Digg employee — Andrei Zmievski — has wrapped libmemcached into a new extension! You can download it here: PECL memcached Finally!

UPDATED: 2009/02/18

For you tech wiz kids out there… Read this dope article by Paul Saab / Facebook Engineering …. how they leverage memcached and super optimized the hell out of it!

UPDATED: 2009/09/30

I just noticed that this PECL memcached is now ’stable’ as of 2009/07/07 — def check it out now:
http://pecl.php.net/package/memcached

Well technically, I had left it there on deposit… over a year ago… since then moved to Flordia.  Was in Miami for 6 months, then Sarasota/Tampa area for a while.  And completely FORGOT about this account!

I was recently over at the Hard Rock celebrating a friends birthday — imagine my surprise when I discovered I had $17,500 in my account waiting for me!

You see, I leave cash at casinos, because they have some benefits over banks:

• They’re open 24 hours a day!  Show me a bank that can compete with that!  I do a lot of things last minute, book my flights day before or same day.  One night at 10pm, I book a 9am flight to Aruba… needed cash for the trip… thank goodness for my 24hour casino bank!

• Casinos have unlimited cash on hand!  Try and withdraw >$20K from a bank… did you know that usually its not available?  Each branch knows how much money it needs on a daily basis.  And they don’t forecast for unusually large cash withdrawals.  Most of the time, the branch will require you to order the cash, and it can take a couple days to get it!

• No government reporting!  When you withdraw $10K+ from a bank… they make you fill out a nifty little IRS form.

But wait!  It gets better… I deposited $45,000 at Harrah’s in Atlantic City and they instantly upgraded me to their VIP card.  Then I showed a Borgata host my Harrah’s VIP card, and he gave me a Borgata VIP card too.  You bring the cash – and they’ll take care of you!  (Just don’t lose it on the tables!)

This seems to work all over… I’ve been to casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Tahoe, Bahamas, Aruba, Monaco, Amsterdam, Australia.

And in a year – where several of my investments have been losers…  Getting 0% interest at Hard Rock casino feels like a winner!

A couple days ago, I talked about squeezing the profits out a campaign… every last drop! 1-2% matters!! To me anyways, but allow me to set the stage for you:

A few weeks ago, Scott Richter (Affiliate.com) came to Las Vegas to party. I met up with him, and he was rolling with a deep entourage… Gilbert, Lou, George, and who knows who else? I had pre-gamed, and was already buzzing at the time.

We went to Bank @ Bellagio and crashed the Vegas Socialite party. Gill+Scott+crew showed up the entire night club that night. The smoke would barely settle from the sparklers + last magnum bottle of PJ before the next would arrive! I approached Scott — and was like — “yo I gotta introduce u to my host… we get 2 for 1 bottles all over town” And his reply told all “Its all good… Gill’s taking care of it!”

… Economy must be good! …

Anyways for the rest of us, that aren’t dropping $10K+ a night on bottle service, I gotta recommend the AMEX Plum Card. Uber Affiliate Paul Borque has already written about the AMEX Plum card benefits here.

Basically you get a 2% discount on your spending if you pay the full statement balance within 10 days. This is very significant. And I wish I could take advantage of it more — but as a merchant, most of my partners require me to wire cash! Publishers, definitely get one now!

Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table…

Let’s get technical again…

I’m often surprised at how little depth some sysadmins have.  And even more so, when they have no ambition to learn how to code.  The best sysadmins I know can grok code — even complex code — and better when they can produce it too.

If you don’t code, you’ll never get deep enough in the stack — and understand the whole loop — start to finish.

I remember a situation where we needed to transfer large amounts of data… 100GB – 1TB database backups.  The original solution involved a huge tarred file and SSH/SCP… far from optimal.  SSH requires TCP, which is problematic for high performance… even with super dialed-in OS-level tuning.  With SSH and TCP we were seeing 100-150Mbps performance on the local network.  Turning encryption off helps a little, but I think there is a window / buffering issue that limits overall performance.

Many suggest rsync.  But in my experience, rsync never performed much better…

Searching for alternatives, I hit up some buddies…  one guided me to “tar pipe” which is tar plus netcat. This solution destroyed SSH/SCP — ringing in TCP results of 850Mbps and UDP transfers up to 940Mbps.  But it wasn’t perfect, netcat isn’t super fault tolerant… and there exist some reliability issues.

Another buddy suggested UDT “UDP-based Data Transfer” which was more reliable than tarpipe, and performed the best… reaching 950Mbps.  Basically Gigabit thoroughly maxed out.  Not much more to optimize!

UDT was a huge winner… 80-90% speedups.  Effectively reducing the amount of time to restore a database backup in our organization from hours to minutes…

And time is money… check it out!

Its been a while… missed ya tons!

I was SUPER BUSY during the holidays.  I even skipped Family Thanksgiving, chasing dollar signs…  But we got the offer launched and syndicated.

The traffic started rolling in and we started agressively optimizing the site.  At one point, we were running 32 different variations of the landing page, 4 versions of the order page, and 2 versions of the checkout… so multiply it out — 256 combinations in one test.

We selected winners quickly and moved on … running a total of 10 unique tests during the campaign.  Early in the campaign, we found significant optimizations yielding 100+% gains…think better copy/call to action, reducing anxiety, easing the sale, etc…

Later in testing, we were fighting for small improvements.  But even 1-2% extra on a heavily optimized campaign is meaningful  (Think AMEX Plum Cards.)

So picture this – we’re running a heavily optimized site.  We’re converting well in a niche retail category.  I’m struggling — grasping at straws — what else can we do to increase sales?

At the time, weight loss products were killing it.  I surveyed multiple networks.  Browsed their creatives and landing pages.  Picking them apart.  And noticed how adding credibility can drive sales.

Look at Ryan Eagle, seems like he showed up out of nowhere!  And now he’s a D-list Internet celebrity! Do your own research — but he leveraged Kim Kardashian’s assets to sell his products online!

I wasn’t nearly so adventurous… but I did rip this graphic straight off some ACAI site:

Uhhh…. my product has never been featured on CNN or FOX or ABC …. but whatever… I dropped that graphic front + center on the homepage… And it increased conversions another 5%!!  Here’s the test results from Google Website Optimizer: