Update 4: Jeff Atwood costs out Markus' scale up approach against a scale out approach and finds scale up wanting. The discussion in the comments is as interesting as the article. My guess is Markus doesn't want to rewrite his software to work across a scale out cluster so even if it's more expensive scale up works better for his needs.
Update 3: POF now has 200 million images and serves 10,000 images served per second. They'll be moving to a 250,000 IOPS RamSan to handle the load. Also upgraded to a core database machine with 512 GB of RAM, 32 CPU’s, SQLServer 2008 and Windows 2008.
Update 2: This seems to be a POF Peer1 love fest infomercial. It's pretty content free, but the production values are high. Lots of quirky sounds and fish swimming on the screen.
Update: by Facebook standards Read/WriteWeb says POF is worth a cool one billion dollars. It helps to talk like Dr. Evil when saying it out loud.

PlentyOfFish is a hugely popular on-line dating system slammed by over 45 million visitors a month and 30+ million hits a day (500 - 600 pages per second). But that's not the most interesting part of the story. All this is handled by one person, using a handful of servers, working a few hours a day, while making $6 million a year from Google ads. Jealous? I know I am. How are all these love connections made using so few resources?

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With recent launch of the Google Analytics Data Export API, Google Analytics data is starting to show up in some new places. One of the most exciting places is on your mobile phone.

In the past it was challenging to keep up with your performance data while on the go. Using the new API, a number of developers have created mobile solutions to tackle this challenge. Note, it still takes our system some time to process your data, so if you're checking today's data, proceed with caution.

For the Android OS:

Check out Mobile GA from Actual Metrics.



This app is great since it allows me to quickly identify what metrics are changing on my site.

I reached out to Mike and Kirk from Actual Metrics to get a sense of how difficult this application was to build. "The GA API was very easy to use, Mike mentioned, "it is extremely flexible and allows us to get the data we want. What may require multiple calls in other product APIs can be done with just one with the GA API, allowing for higher product performance. "

For the iPhone:


Analytics App is great for accessing all your GA Data. The Google Analytics for iPhone app also has some great reporting. Finally, Ego App allows you to consolidate reporting from different services, such as FeedBurner and Twitter, all in one simple dashboard.

Note, these apps were developed by third parties, so if you encounter any bugs or issues, you should reach out to those developers directly.

That's it! Do you have a cool app you want to share? Post a comment and let us know!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

With the growing adoption of Google’s User Statistics Patch**, the need for supporting scripts has become clear. To that end, we’ve created check-unused-keys, a Perl script to provide a nicer interface than directly querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database.

check-unused-keys can be invoked and used as follows:

%> check-unused-keys --help
Usage:
     check-unused-keys [OPTIONS]

     Options:
       -d, –databases=<dbname>  Comma-separated list of databases to check
       -h, –help                Display this message and exit
       -H, –hostname=<hostname> The target MySQL server host
       –ignore-databases        Comma-separated list of databases to ignore
       –ignore-indexes          Comma-separated list of indexes to ignore
                                     db_name.tbl_name.index_name
       –ignore-tables           Comma-separated list of tables to ignore
                                     db_name.tbl_name
       –options-file            The options file to use
       -p, –password=<password> The password of the MySQL user
       -i, –port=<portnum>      The port MySQL is listening on
       -s, –socket=<sockfile>   Use the specified mysql unix socket to connect
       -t, –tables=<tables>     Comma-separated list of tables to evaluate
                                     db_name.tbl_name
       –[no]summary             Display summary information
       -u, –username=<username> The MySQL user used to connect
       -v, –verbose             Increase verbosity level
       -V, –version             Display version information and exit

     Defaults are:

     ATTRIBUTE                  VALUE
     ————————– ——————
     databases                  ALL databases
     help                       FALSE
     hostname                   localhost
     ignore-databases           No default value
     ignore-indexes             No default value
     ignore-tables              No default value
     options-file               ~/.my.cnf
     password                   No default value
     port                       3306
     socket                     No default value
     summary                    TRUE
     tables                     No Default Value
     username                   No default value
     verbose                    0 (out of 2)
     version                    FALSE

** FULLTEXT indexes are not taken into account by this patch, so be wary. And, as always, sanity check the suggestions and test thoroughly before making changes to production.

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Entry posted by Ryan Lowe | No comment

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2.8.1 Beta 2 is ready for testing.  Download it, check out the changes since beta 1, and review all tickets fixed in 2.8.1.  We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues.  Notable fixes in beta 2:

• Translation of role names fixed
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
• Switched back to curl as the default transport
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

Thanks again for testing WordPress.