Overview

This post details the preparations made for participating in ISUcon.

Goals and Objectives

Goals
- Use the full duration of the ISUcon preliminaries for tuning.
  - While winning is the goal, as a first-time participant, a realistic target was set.
Objectives
- Enhance knowledge around infrastructure.
- Improve understanding of building applications with performance considerations.
- Aim to contribute to performance tuning tasks within the company (work hard).

Recruited Members

Invited a colleague from the company to form a two-person team.

Reviewed Performance Tuning Procedures

Preparation

Checked regulations
Set up the environment
Configured SSH
Took backups
Built automated deployment
- Simple scripts
  - Execute deployment tasks via SSH connection, restart middleware, etc.
Implemented monitoring tools
- netdata
Implemented profiling tools
- alp
  - Access log profiler
  - https://github.com/tkuchiki/alp
- php
  - xhprof
Benchmarking

Configuration Check

Process check
- Stop unnecessary ones
Hardware resources
- top
Database
- MySQL
  - Check data size
    - Verify size and row count per table

mysql> use database;
mysql> SELECT table_name, engine, table_rows, avg_row_length, floor((data_length+index_length)/1024/1024) as allMB, floor((data_length)/1024/1024) as dMB, floor((index_length)/1024/1024) as iMB FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema=database() ORDER BY (data_length+index_length) DESC;

Application
- Identify URLs
- Code reading

Tuning

Measure performance → Analyze → Tune → Measure
- Determine if it's CPU, IO, application, or DB

Impressions

Participating for the first time was a humbling experience. Despite the lack of practice, basic skills were lacking, so I aim to prepare and improve to compete properly next year. It was a valuable opportunity to reassess my challenges and significantly influence my future motivation. I am grateful to the organizers for such an incredible event, especially since it's free.