I noticed Sarah working on a crossword puzzle from the local ad circular that comes in the mail. At first glance I thought that section was labeled “WordPress” instead of “Word pressed”.

I’m bummed that there are still so many hosts running known to be broken combinations of PHP + libxml2. In the meantime we may as well make it easier for people to work around the issue.

The early bird tickets are still available, for only $15 (which includes lunch and t-shirt). After August 27th the ticket price goes up to $20. We are trying to encourage people to signup early because it makes getting accurate numbers for t-shirt and lunch orders easier. So go hit the WordCamp SLC 2011 registration page today and save yourself a few dollars.

I look forward to seeing everyone again up at the University of Utah on September 10th.

This year we trying something a bit different. If you register before August 27th you will get $5 off the regular ticket price.

So go register now, and mark your calendars for September 10th!

I’m looking forward to another exciting event, last year we were very fortunate to have a great location at the University of Utah. With wifi that worked the whole time and plenty of power outlets under the seats, it worked out really well. For 2011 we’ll be returning to the UoU, in the Skaggs Biology Building. Maps are available at http://2011.slc.wordcamp.org/location/.

Additional details will be posted at the official WordCamp SLC 2011 blog and WCSLC Twitter account. The hash tag for the event is #wcslc

We’ll be putting out a call for speakers soon, and tickets should go one sale in the next week or so. Mark September 10th on your calendars and come spend the day with other local WordPress fans, users, designers, and developers!

On WordPress.com we have over 218 million tables and perform tens of thousands queries per second. To scale all of this, we shard our 24 million blogs across more than 550 MySQL servers. This allows us to cope with load bursts and to handle database servers failures.

The post goes on to describe some of the reasons why you might run into replication lag in MySQL and methods HyperDB uses to deal with that. In the case of WordPress.com there are additional issues to consider, like replication across multiple datacenters.

Something that HyperDB has had for awhile is the ability to force read queries back to the master if a write happened earlier on the same connection:

If a connection modifies data in a given table, then all subsequent SELECTs on the same connection for that table are sent to the master. Chances are replication won’t be fast enough to propagate the changes to the slaves on the same page load.

This is a fairly simple technique than can be remarkably useful.

You can find out more about HyperDB on the HyperDB WordPress Codex page, the HyperDB WordPress plugin page, and the HyperDB mailing list. You can also grab a copy directly from the HyperDB Subversion repository.