mtgox.com = "MySQL error, please retry later"

[marvinmartian]

I think gox has gone for the minimalist approach to representing trade data.  

The subject line is what I'm getting off the main page.

I've seen trainwrecks before but they normally happen pretty fast.  This is like watching it in slow motion.

Gonna go make some popcorn.

PS.  Anyone else find it odd (scary) that the major exchange for bitcoins uses mysql for its backend?

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[YoYa]

You seen the licencing costs on the real thing-Oracle or MS?

Gox's profits of the last 3 months could be blown on a few MS Enterprise licences. Tho Enterprise isn't worth it

MySql can do the job just as well......but only as good as the person who implements it and the models they use.

TBH....DB is old tech, some of the tech currently in development will make traditional relational databases look like a Model T.

[marvinmartian]

You seen the licencing costs on the real thing-Oracle or MS?

Gox's profits of the last 3 months could be blown on a few MS Enterprise licences. Tho Enterprise isn't worth it

MySql can do the job just as well......but only as good as the person who implements it and the models they use.

TBH....DB is old tech, some of the tech currently in development will make traditional relational databases look like a Model T.

Yes, that's valid logic when setting up a website for something like ... your favorite anime movies.

But if you're considering setup of a site that deals with lots of $$$ and has to interface with a large user base ... and needs to be secure ... here's what you do:

1.  Get some investors to fund your project
2.  Spend the money on real database technology

Actually, the above model is true for anything that aims to be even remotely professional.  There is no comparison between MySQL and Oracle.  I've worked with both on a professional level and several others who have gone the way of the dodo (eg., Sybase, Redbrick, etc...) including performance bench-testing them all.

MySQL would have been fine when they were trading a couple of thousand $ per day.  It's not fine anymore.

But you don't have to believe me.  Time will tell the truth beyond the shadow of a doubt.

[Malnilion]

They're getting slammed right now, I'm sure. Hopefully they can get off the ground pretty soon. I'd take a couple failed page loads, but the site needs to be functional despite the high load to be expected for a few hours.

[marvinmartian]

They're getting slammed right now, I'm sure. Hopefully they can get off the ground pretty soon. I'd take a couple failed page loads, but the site needs to be functional despite the high load to be expected for a few hours.

I think they're doing their best to avoid piling another catastrophe on top of the current one.  Frankly, I'm not sure they have the chops to avoid it.

[Nagle]

MySQL would have been fine when they were trading a couple of thousand $ per day.  It's not fine anymore.

It's possible to run a far bigger site than Mt. Gox with MySQL. Wikipedia runs on MySQL. But they have replication, caches, load balancers, etc. Mt. Gox, after seeing their PHP error messages, seems to be a straightforward PHP/MySQL site, probably with everything on one machine. That's not good enough for a financial system.

This is more of a security problem than a capacity problem. The back end that handles the money needs to be isolated from the front end that handles the web.  But it helps capacity, too. Once you have the money back-end, which doesn't handle that many transactions per second, separated out and working, you can add capacity to the front end without much trouble.  If the front end has some publishing system that fetches pages from a database, that should be completely separate from the back-end money database, and on a different machine. Read-only access to trade data can be handled by fetching it from replicated copies of the relevant database tables, without bothering the money back-end for every query.

None of this is expensive from a hardware or software perspective, and it's all standard technology.

[BCwinning]

You seen the licencing costs on the real thing-Oracle or MS?

Gox's profits of the last 3 months could be blown on a few MS Enterprise licences. Tho Enterprise isn't worth it

MySql can do the job just as well......but only as good as the person who implements it and the models they use.

TBH....DB is old tech, some of the tech currently in development will make traditional relational databases look like a Model T.

Yes, that's valid logic when setting up a website for something like ... your favorite anime movies.

But if you're considering setup of a site that deals with lots of $$$ and has to interface with a large user base ... and needs to be secure ... here's what you do:

1.  Get some investors to fund your project
2.  Spend the money on real database technology

Actually, the above model is true for anything that aims to be even remotely professional.  There is no comparison between MySQL and Oracle.  I've worked with both on a professional level and several others who have gone the way of the dodo (eg., Sybase, Redbrick, etc...) including performance bench-testing them all.

MySQL would have been fine when they were trading a couple of thousand $ per day.  It's not fine anymore.

But you don't have to believe me.  Time will tell the truth beyond the shadow of a doubt.

SQL is perfectly fine for their operation.
Spend the money on someone who knows what the hell they are doing. on hardware and bandwidth.
Everyone else is a fucking idiot saying otherwise at this point and time.

[jgraham]

It's possible to run a far bigger site than Mt. Gox with MySQL. Wikipedia runs on MySQL. But they have replication, caches, load balancers, etc. Mt. Gox, after seeing their PHP error messages, seems to be a straightforward PHP/MySQL site, probably with everything on one machine. That's not good enough for a financial system.

Especially considering that we are talking about a high-IOPs environment not a bulk-data environment.  I've run MySQL's cluster system on 4 year old hardware with huge IOPs demand.   All we did is max out the RAM, CPUs and replaced the spinning disk with SSDs.  Adding extra nodes to up performance was trivial.

If they are in fact running their entire application stack in a single box.   Then they are not being very smart.  In this day and age not only can you tier your data and applications into separate systems to reduce your attack surface.   You can put reverse-proxies and web application firewalls (like mod security) in place to detect SQL-Injection attacks before they even reach your app.