Man, giving a talk remote is always hard.  Is my mic too soft?  Can they hear me?  Did some poor guy with a hearing aid just have it blown out ’cause I had my mic too loud?  Am I pacing ok?  What about handling questions?

Well, thanks to the expert help of Susie and Clint, I didn’t have to worry about any of this while giving my talk on Tuning Sugar Databases to SDUG.  Everything functioned smoothly and the only thing I had to worry about was pacing myself, which seemed to work out good. Hopefully those who attended picked up a few new tricks.  For those who didn’t get to attend live, we’ll have a recording of the webinar online soon.  I’ll update when we do.

I promised some links during the presentation, so here you go.  Our wiki is online @ http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/.  There’s excellent info throughout the wiki, but the settings I touched on specifically are all outlined in Performance Tweaks for Large Systems, except one.  Someone mentioned that there was no reference to $calculate_response_time on the wiki, that is correct and will be fixed.  In meantime, here’s a quick intro to it. Adding the following line to your config.php:

"calculate_response_time" = true,

Will get you output like:

The other links I mentioned where, in no particular order:

• MySQL Manual
• MySQL GUI Tools
• SugarCRM’s CTO Series

Also, for anyone who’s interested, the MySQL AB tool for automating many of the processes I outlined is MySQL Enterprise. If you’re short on people or expertise, outsourcing your DBA duties to the company that created MySQL is a great option.

Hope that helps get you started on tuning your SugarCRM installs on MySQL.  If you have any questions that we didn’t get covered in the presentation or Q & A, post them here and we’ll get you answers.

My good friend and cohort in CRM blogging, Martin Schneider, posted a review yesterday about a recent article from Psychology Today that analyzes why developers participate in open source communities. While I agree with Martin’s thoughts, I think the motivations go a bit deeper…right into the wallet.

First, let’s take the “street cred” idea a bit further. What I’ve seen in the Sugar community is that independent consultants and system integration firms can turn “street cred” into “business cred” or marketability and make some money. Simply put, companies hire you for projects if you are a credible Sugar community member. Also, IT developers NEED to have open source experience on their resumes these days to get the best jobs. Hiring somebody who actually contributes code to an open source project gives companies real competitive advantage for their business.

So being a prominent member of the Sugar community turns into actual dollars (Euros, kroners, Linden dollars, whatever). That’s a VERY powerful concept that is glossed over with the ticky tacky term “street cred”.

Now let’s take the “self-actualization” idea. Yeah, coders code because they like to code. Coding is cool. Believe it or not, one of my favorite ways of relaxing is to fix bugs in Sugar. Now call me wacko (my wife calls me other things), but Sugar is my baby and I want to see her not just sing, but friggen Rock the Cazbah (shout out to John’s current favorite band). So I certainly agree with the point on “self-actualization.”

However, the ability for a company, a project manager and/or a developer implementing SugarCRM to take control of their own destiny around the Sugar app is HUGE. I’ve project managed implementations of proprietary CRM systems in past lives. There’s nothing better at blowing up your project schedule than a showstopper bug or unexpected limitation in an API.

With open source, a company can fix the problem themselves if needed or extend an API to meet their needs. Now SugarCRM works very hard as a company to respond to all of our customer’s reported issues in a timely manner, but when your go-live date is looming ahead of you and your CEO demands no delays, there is nothing better than having the ability to fix any issues yourself and not be tied to the responsiveness of your vendor. And if you are an independent consultant or system integration firm, time = money.  Again, control is a very powerful aspect which drives developers to open source that goes way beyond “self-actualization” or even “altruism”. It drives sanity for the developer and bottom-line value for the business.

Personally, I think these two ideas of marketability and control should have been included in the Psychology Today as these are the motivations I hear about everyday from Sugar community members.  And marketability is about putting money in your wallet and control is about keeping money from flowing out of your wallet.

A couple recent performance benchmark reports have been written that use SugarCRM as the test app. Both reports are focused on benchmarking specific environments and only use SugarCRM as the test app, but they do give you a good idea of the scale possible with SugarCRM.

• Scaling SugarCRM with MySQL on Sun’s Coolthreads server by Satish Vanga at Sun Microsystems. Focused on showing the scalability of SugarCRM on Sun hardware, this report shows the large scalability possible (700 concurrent users!) with SugarCRM and MySQL on the Sun Coolthreads server.

  From the report…
  Conclusion
  In our tests we found that the Sun’s Coolthreads server can scale to large number of concurrent users on a single server running both SugarCRM and MySQL. There is not much performance impact if the MySQL is run inside Solaris Containers vs running it in the global zone along with SugarCRM. At 700 concurrent user load we only saw 15% of the network bandwidth used and still left with enough cpu cycles. Sun’s Coolthreads server does scale well with the SAMP stack based applications more specifically SugarCRM and MySQL database.

• Load Testing SugarCRM in a Virtual Machine done by http://www.webperformanceinc.com. Focused on showing the performance differences between running a web app in a virtual machine vs a dedicated physical server, this report doesn’t look to tune a system for maximum performance like the Sun article but rather to take a basic SugarCRM installation and compare the load and performance results on a VM vs a physical machine. Note that the user counts below are concurrent users and not named users.

  From the report…
  Conclusion
  Under the conditions tested, the reference application (SugarCRM) showed a 14% decrease in total user capacity when running in a virtual machine (decreasing from 35 users to 30). At the peak capacity of the virtual machine (30 users), the average page duration was 1.57 seconds, whereas the average page duration of the physical machine at the same load level was 0.97 seconds. Compared at that level, the average page duration for the virtual machine increased 61% over the same load on the physical machine.Since most applications only run occasionally at full capacity, it is worth also analyzing the performance of the system at a lower level of load. At 21 users (60% of the full capacity of the physical machine, 70% of virtualized capacity), the average page duration was 0.84 seconds for the physical machine and 1.00 seconds for the virtual machine - an increase of only 19%. For our reference application, this difference (0.16 seconds) is unlikely to be noticed by the average user.

Both reports have really useful information if you’re interested in the details of SugarCRM scalability and performance. It’s great to see SugarCRM becoming a default test app for these different scenarios. Enjoy!

Hi all -

We are kicking off the 2008 online Sugar Dev-User Group sessions this week with a webcast on building upgrade-safe customizations hosted by Majed, one the lead developers. If you have an hour this Wednesday at 10am Pacific, I highly encourage you to sign up.

We would like to get your input on topics for future sessions. Here are a few suggestions to get the ideas going:

1. MySQL performance tuning. How to get the most out of MySQL for a scalable SugarCRM installation.
2. The new Sugar 5.0 MVC framework. How to make common code-level UI customizations in 5.0.
3. Diving deep with Sugar Web Services. In-depth examples of using the Web Service API’s.

What else tickles your fancy?

Clint

I just read a fascinating post on SiliconValleyWatcher.com where Tom Foremski discusses his idea that Silicon Valley is becoming Media Valley. As he rightly points out, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc are all technology-enabled media companies, not pure-play technology companies. He posits that the media center of the US is shifting from NYC to SV.

But what really got my attention was his rather off-hand comment at the end, “Every company is now a media company to a greater degree than ever before. Even if a company makes steel, or napkins. Every company publishes to its customers, staff, partners, neighbors, to itself. It had better master the two-way media technologies that we now have or it will not survive.”

This point particularly hit home as I spend a big part of my day, every day, thinking about communicating with and fostering communication within the Sugar Community. And we use tools that didn’t event exist just a few years ago with forum, blog and Wiki software. Beyond that we are naturally also using the tried and true channels of email and websites to communicate with the community. We even have an advertising medium with SugarExchange where third-party ISV’s pay to list their wares.

The amount of media-like material that we generate as a software company is truly outstanding at times. And it’s not like what we are doing is way out there. Every modern company that wants to be successful has to figure out how to master these new tools and become more like a media company.

Now here is a truly interesting thought. As we look at Sugar 6.0, we are looking at folding in forum, blog and Wiki components into the Sugar application. After all, these are just new communication channels with the customer, right? You want to know what your customers posted in your forums just as much as you want to know what emails they sent you. Clearly sending out email marketing campaigns is a form of media management.

So as the Internet evolves and CRM software evolves with it, is CRM software and media software converging? Interesting thoughts. I’d love to hear yours.

Matt Asay posted that The US Government Bets Big on Open Source. I love what Matt Asay writes and I think he’s poignant. He furthers “the cause” and we’re, as Open Source advocates, fortunate to have him.

So it is rare when I disagree with him - I hardly think of implementing Open Source as “Betting Big”. I frankly feel that all software implementations are a crap-shot if you don’t do due diligence, have an effective roll out plan, and train all the users. But it’s a real big gamble when it’s proprietary software. Who knows what’s in that black box?

One area of improvement I see for our government is in customer service. The Federal Government would really benefit from a Customer Relationship Management System… hmmm, if I only knew of an Open Source CRM system that really scales…. hmmmm….

On a more serious note, I spoke recently with a member of a state government (which will remain nameless) who heard this message loud and clear. They knew their weakness and that the constituents they served deserved better. I’m glad they made a choice to go Sugar. It’s not the first (or second, etc) state to use Sugar either. Which means to me that there’s a lot of opportunity at the local, state, and federal levels.

If you’re a developer in the public-sector, I encourage you to speak up about your use of Open Source and your use of SugarCRM in your organization. I know there are a lot of VARs and System Integrators reading this blog - I encourage you to look for opportunities in the public sector. It’s only going to grow from here, get there now.

Technorati Tags: government, open source

What is the point of Open Source if you don’t contribute?

I just read a post over at TechCrunch about Firefox 3 Beta 3. It wasn’t so much the post, but it was the comments that got me. For example:

Aaron Stannard
February 12th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I’m about to drop FF like a bad habit and start using IE again.

Webside Ventures
February 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I gave up on FF and switched back to IE7 a while ago. I still use FF when I need to use the plugins, such as Firebug.

Seriously though, this is so obnoxious to me. Firefox is a free browser that’s a project where people dedicate their time to making something freely available. If you don’t like something, get involved! If something doesn’t work the way you want it to, GET INVOLVED!

How many of you want to contribute to the SugarCRM code base? How many of you want to add new features? What are the barriers to entry for you? What would make it easier?

If you’re like me you sometimes find the Module Builder terminology of “Deploy”, “Publish” and “Export” a little fuzzy.

This article summarizes the terminology nicely.

How many of your are tuned in and waiting something good from the blog? Gimme a shout out! If there’s something in particular you want to hear about, let us know. We’ll blog it!

Hey all, I studied long and hard in order to bone up for the “GPLv3 and You” talk I did today. Events like SugarCon are really terrific as “forcing events” to go deep, deep, deep into a topic that may not be top of mind before the event.So, like a lawyer preparing for a jury trial, I made sure I was well-versed, over-prepared, and simply brimming with GPLv3 wisdom. After all, I didn’t have to go this deep since last July when we announced we’ll support GPLv3 beginning with Sugar Community Edition 5.0.

Well, an odd thing happened. Nobody really cared!!! A pall of silence descended over the ballroom when I finished my expertly crafted dissertation and asked, with some trepidation: “Are there any questions?”. Crickets, crickets, and more crickets.

Upon reflection, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the response. I think we Sugar types vastly overestimated the importance of GPLv3 to the average developer who, after all, is concerned only with getting their jobs done under tight deadlines back at the shop. Yes, if they ever intend to distribute, er, “convey”, his or her code … well, then they’ll think back to that brilliant dissertation they heard at SugarCon. And even then most really don’t care as GPLv3 makes it easy.

I’ve come to understand that GPLv3 is really “inside baseball” for the vast majority of our community. Lesson learned … on to the next topic.