Sunday, September 09, 2007

Saturday, September 08, 2007

OSSCampDelhi Sept 8, 2007

Day 1:

I traveled all the way to Delhi to attend OSSCampDelhi, Non-Conference (Bar Camp), my first Open Source Camp in India. It started well with a good presentation on "HIGH Performance Websites".
Speaker shared few tricks how to make you front-end load faster.
  • Use of expire headers for javascript, css
  • Use of compressor to remove spaces in javascript using tools like (Dojo Shrink safe, YUI Compressor, JSMin, Dean Edwards Packer)
  • use of mod_gzip/ mod deflate for apache
  • not to use @import use "link" tags
  • load script at last (although i am don't agree)
Another interesting presentation was on "MySQL Performance Tuning" from a OSS guys. We had a good discuss after the session which helped me to learn few new things. Few do's listed by the Presenter(for specific to InnoDB)
  • use varchar instead of char
  • avoid using count (*) with InnoDB, ( You can use it for MyISAM since it stores row count)
  • avoid use of autocommit, use transaction mechanism for multiple statements
  • configure to use larger data pools.
  • disable non required engines
  • use auto increment for unique identification rather than primary keys (lot of thing to argue on this)
  • make NOT NULL columns if possible
  • enable log-slow-query (this helps to track slow queries so that you can optimize it
Some other useful command for MySQL
  • SHOW PROCESSLIST
  • SHOW GLOBAL status like 'slow_queries'
  • SHOW LOCAL status like 'slow_queries'
Mir Nazim, gave a good intro to Drupal. Some of new members in Open Source world were very much thrilled by its powerful nature as CMS.

To end the day Noel Hidalgo, expressed his view on use of Media in Social Sector. I was very much impressed with way and his thinking about the use of internet, technology, social networking etc, in Social Sector. We had good laugh at some of his jokes and enjoyed his story on "Scooter Group".

I conducted a session on CiviCRM, it was good to see few enthusiasts from the crowd.

To summarize the day, i would say besides few sessions other stuff was not for me :(. It was much of a training session or i should say engineering student presenting for some contest.