ToddH's questions

I have a very fast 8 core Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit desktop machine with 16GB of memory running MySQL 5.1.41 but something seems to be wrong with the MySQL installation (even though it's an unmodified stock MySQL installation). I also have a less powerful dual-core Mac Mini running Snow Leopard 10.7 and MySQL 5.0.91.

When loading loading a small 9MB mysqldump generated database the Ubuntu machine takes 33 seconds of wall time and the Mac mini takes 2 seconds:

ubuntu> time mysql --user=root vm-dev -e "source test/database/database.sql" real 0m33.554s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.030s

macmini> time mysql --user=root vm-dev -e "source test/database/database.sql" real 0m2.077s user 0m0.108s sys 0m0.054s

What kinds of things should I look for that could be wrong with the ubuntu server?

Working on medium sized websites we've always built our own real-time traffic graphing solutions and displayed those on a big screen mission control style so that if traffic starts to climb, load start to climb, latency increases, etc we can start watching it pro-actively before the monitoring system goes off.

Now I'm starting at a new company and we need the same thing, are there companies that have mission control style real-time website monitoring software products? Not web analytics, but real-time graphing of things like simultaneous users, page views, hits, avg HTML render time, etc. It would require installing some kind of agent on each web server (or the load balancer) since Javascript tracking is insufficient to detect for example when a spam-bot starts pummeling the site. I've googled and can't find anything.