RCSP (Riverbed Certified Solutions Professional)

The RCSP exam is an interesting exam to self study for. There is basically the official Riverbed class, and really if you have the option, I recommend that. But if you are going to go your own...

First priority, read the RCSP certification website on preparing (and the rest on their cert in general). I found it useful to even read the class descriptions.

Second priority gather all the free materials you can.
You'll need to get the Certification Guide, you will also need the Management Console User's Guide, the Command-Line Interface Guide, the Steelhead Appliance Deployment Guide and the Steelhead Appliance Installation and Configuration Guide. Those are available from Riverbed's site, but you probably need registration.

Now you can either do the recommended outside reading or skip only to the Riverbed stuff. I think it is much easier to pass the test (but longer) if you do the outside reading.

The outside reading consists of some documents linked in the certification guide. The three of the linked documents I learned the most from are Steven's TCP/IP and Internet Routing Architectures and RFC 2474. I had already read Stevens and Halabi and if you haven't and you are a network jockey, you should. There really is only one network protocol that you can find everywhere, and Stevens covers it like sheet. Halabi follows up with Internet Routing Architectures (which if you've had to do BGP, you should have read anyway). So I was new to RFC 2474 even though I'd done a few QoS implementations, and the RFC was pretty dry, it was good to make it through the material. You can get access to Stevens and Halabi with a free trial of Safari (safari.ciscopress.com or safari.oreilly.com) or you can keep a Safari account like I do, the entry level is pretty inexpensive.

I also found a Cisco section on QoS that was useful and not part of the material recommended by the study guide:
"Implementing Quality of Service Policies with DSCP" when I was studying up on QoS that was informative.

After you mow through the outside material at least once, start learning the Riverbed technologies. If you are skipping the outside reading, I hope you have sound networking fundamentals and have some experience. Anything in the study guide is fair game so read all the study guide and all the Riverbed docs. I had to read the CLI guide a few times, because frankly I don't use the Steelhead CLI as much as the GUI or the CMC. The exam is very particular and don't worry if you have to take the exam more than once. The RCSP exam is close to the Cisco exams in the exact nature of the questions, but has a different feel (no simulations). I think you could implement Steelheads and not pass this exam, so pay attention to all the study material. Do not be over confident.

How to tell if you have a MySQL performance problem

The top three things for mysql performance:

1) run 64bit OS on 64bit hardware with 64bit version of mysql (newer versions of mysql do better with large amounts of RAM if you aren't using 4.1+ you may not be able to use enough RAM).
2) make sure your indexes fit in RAM
3) Make sure you log slow queries and check the logs for problems. This is your number

Number 1 is easy.

Number 2 is a little harder. You can eyeball this if you are running ISAM databases by summing up all your IDX files and then seeing if MySQL is using more RAM than that.

But a really good way is to run a report: http://hackmysql.com/mysqlreport It has really good documentation and can make suggestions. You can use it to tune other options.

Number 3 requires a change in logging. You can also change the threshold- what is slow for you may not be for someone else. The problem with logs is you have to look at them, understand them and then act on them. Get going.