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Autotune – Cloud Diagnostics and Performance Tuning

28 points by abhiyerra 10y ago

BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
Naming your software after another high-profile piece of commercial software seems inadvisable.
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Good point... I actually thought the other Autotune was a piece of hardware...
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    It can be in a rack-mount for live use but in offhand conversation, it's an audio software / plug-in. For future reference, the United States Patent and Trademark Office offers a lookup service to quickly check if a planned mark might already be registered. http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-t...
  - radiowave 10y ago
    Given that "Autotune the news" renamed itself to "Songify the news", it's highly likely that Autotune's owners are not shy about enforcing their trademark.
    - BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
      I figured that move was more about wanting to promote their own brand instead of someone else's. (They began selling Songify apps around the same time.)
- coldcode 10y ago
  I first thought the article was about using the cloud to improve Autotune (the singing tool) settings.
nicksergeant 10y ago
Really frustrating when websites just plaster me in the face with an email signup form before I even have a chance to read what the business / app is all about: http://i.nick.sg/1e71733605744a9ba084737429cc694d.png http://i.nick.sg/1e71733605744a9ba084737429cc694d.png I just closed the tab. It's not worth it.
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Sorry about that. Removed the form.
paulasmuth 10y ago
Excellent idea! Are there any benchmarks of how the changed sysctl values affect performance?
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  I've used some of the settings at a previous company on an haproxy front end machine. Lead us to move from c4.8xlarge machines to m4.xlarge handling the same traffic. I'll do a future post on how it affects scaling.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nwmcsween 10y ago
It would be nice if a tool could dynamically tune based on server conditions, too much sequential io? Increase read ahead and swap out applications, too much random io, reduce read ahead, etc.
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  That is the eventual goal of this tool. But we have to start somewhere right?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kim0 10y ago
No idea how this will help my idle server! If it's idle, tuning won't really help heh
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Well the goal of the tool is to watch the entire cluster and notify you if any machine is idling or not doing its part. Right now the tool is focused on making existing servers performant, but since it is already collecting diagnostic information it can eventually also notify if a machine is sitting idle. For example, a company I worked at had a Redis slave machine which was quite powerful but we realized 2 years later that it wasn't actually doing anything. Whoops. All the monitoring metrics showed that it was performing well, but nothing actually notified us that by performing well it wasn't doing anything in the first place. This seems to be a common theme when many machines are run. Some go unnoticed and idle away.
slenk 10y ago
My instance isn't reporting anything. Also compains the install.sh is wrong...
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Hey can you email me at abhi@acksin.com and I'll help you debug.
kenrose 10y ago
> However, we found no tool to help tune servers so we decided to write one. I actually looked for a tool similar to this a while ago after finding some larger than necessary servers in our infra not doing very much. Here are some of them: Cloudyn Optimizer https://www.cloudyn.com/products/ https://www.cloudyn.com/products/ CloudCheckr http://cloudcheckr.com/spend-optimization/ http://cloudcheckr.com/spend-optimization/ BotMetric Cloud Cost Management https://www.botmetric.com/aws-cloud-cost-management-cost-analytics/ https://www.botmetric.com/aws-cloud-cost-management-cost-ana... Most of these are aimed at cost reduction through many means (e.g, switch cloud providers, purchase reserved instances), not just improved server efficiency.
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Any tool that reduced the environmental footprint of servers is a tool I want people to use. :)
urgerestraint 10y ago
When is the server portion likely to be open sourced?
- abhiyerra 10y ago
  Hopefully in the next 2 weeks. We are considering just being able to do it via AWS Lambda.

28 points by abhiyerra 10y ago

BHSPitMonkey 10y ago

Naming your software after another high-profile piece of commercial software seems inadvisable.

abhiyerra 10y ago
Good point... I actually thought the other Autotune was a piece of hardware...
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  It can be in a rack-mount for live use but in offhand conversation, it's an audio software / plug-in. For future reference, the United States Patent and Trademark Office offers a lookup service to quickly check if a planned mark might already be registered. http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-t...
- radiowave 10y ago
  Given that "Autotune the news" renamed itself to "Songify the news", it's highly likely that Autotune's owners are not shy about enforcing their trademark.
  - BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
    I figured that move was more about wanting to promote their own brand instead of someone else's. (They began selling Songify apps around the same time.)
coldcode 10y ago
I first thought the article was about using the cloud to improve Autotune (the singing tool) settings.

nicksergeant 10y ago

Really frustrating when websites just plaster me in the face with an email signup form before I even have a chance to read what the business / app is all about: http://i.nick.sg/1e71733605744a9ba084737429cc694d.png http://i.nick.sg/1e71733605744a9ba084737429cc694d.png I just closed the tab. It's not worth it.

abhiyerra 10y ago
Sorry about that. Removed the form.

paulasmuth 10y ago

Excellent idea! Are there any benchmarks of how the changed sysctl values affect performance?

abhiyerra 10y ago
I've used some of the settings at a previous company on an haproxy front end machine. Lead us to move from c4.8xlarge machines to m4.xlarge handling the same traffic. I'll do a future post on how it affects scaling.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

nwmcsween 10y ago

It would be nice if a tool could dynamically tune based on server conditions, too much sequential io? Increase read ahead and swap out applications, too much random io, reduce read ahead, etc.

abhiyerra 10y ago
That is the eventual goal of this tool. But we have to start somewhere right?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

kim0 10y ago

No idea how this will help my idle server! If it's idle, tuning won't really help heh

abhiyerra 10y ago
Well the goal of the tool is to watch the entire cluster and notify you if any machine is idling or not doing its part. Right now the tool is focused on making existing servers performant, but since it is already collecting diagnostic information it can eventually also notify if a machine is sitting idle. For example, a company I worked at had a Redis slave machine which was quite powerful but we realized 2 years later that it wasn't actually doing anything. Whoops. All the monitoring metrics showed that it was performing well, but nothing actually notified us that by performing well it wasn't doing anything in the first place. This seems to be a common theme when many machines are run. Some go unnoticed and idle away.

slenk 10y ago

My instance isn't reporting anything. Also compains the install.sh is wrong...

abhiyerra 10y ago
Hey can you email me at abhi@acksin.com and I'll help you debug.

kenrose 10y ago

> However, we found no tool to help tune servers so we decided to write one. I actually looked for a tool similar to this a while ago after finding some larger than necessary servers in our infra not doing very much. Here are some of them: Cloudyn Optimizer https://www.cloudyn.com/products/ https://www.cloudyn.com/products/ CloudCheckr http://cloudcheckr.com/spend-optimization/ http://cloudcheckr.com/spend-optimization/ BotMetric Cloud Cost Management https://www.botmetric.com/aws-cloud-cost-management-cost-analytics/ https://www.botmetric.com/aws-cloud-cost-management-cost-ana... Most of these are aimed at cost reduction through many means (e.g, switch cloud providers, purchase reserved instances), not just improved server efficiency.

abhiyerra 10y ago
Any tool that reduced the environmental footprint of servers is a tool I want people to use. :)

urgerestraint 10y ago

When is the server portion likely to be open sourced?

abhiyerra 10y ago
Hopefully in the next 2 weeks. We are considering just being able to do it via AWS Lambda.