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Saturday, November 05, 2005
From the "be careful what you wish for" (or is it the "it never rains but pours") department, FeedBlitz's subscriber base increased by nearly half yesterday. Good, right? Well yes - but the sudden extra volume which, in the normal course of events, would have taken a month or two to reach at current growth rates (i.e. relatively speaking, plenty of time to enhance FeedBlitz's performance), is causing very large performance slow downs this morning.
So, having just put in changes to make it more robust - yesterday's run went off beautifully with nary a hitch - we now have to put in changes to make it faster - a lot faster - because if the mails don't go out you don't care about the underlying reasons.
So, having just put in changes to make it more robust - yesterday's run went off beautifully with nary a hitch - we now have to put in changes to make it faster - a lot faster - because if the mails don't go out you don't care about the underlying reasons.
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posted at 10:31 AM
5 Comments:
Any idea what caused the sudden uptick?
Was wondering why I didn't get an email for iLikeCheapStuff.com yet today.
The reason was one, very large, feed came over from bloglet yesterday. It's not that the feed is somehow bad at all. What's happening is that code that the software architecture that worked fine for 50, 500, 5,000 and 40,000 or so users is struggling at the 60,000 level.
At this level, things are starting to take so long now that various internal operations are timing out - which only delays things further, escalating the problem.
Changes are being made now to promote faster execution, higher throuhgput and greater parallelism without hitting the problems last week when the MTA became overloaded because everything was, ironically, running too quickly.
The email came today at 2.53am EST for me, for iLikeCheapStuff.com but did not include photos from the blog posting. I've noticed that photos from the postings are hit or miss lately in the emails, is this because of the overload?
Hi Mike:
I'll look at the feed, but FeedBlitz only emails links to images. If the image doesn't show it's probably a problem with the server serving the imagem, not FeedBlitz (for example I can almost never get photos at blogger to display). FeedBlitz does quite a lot of work internally to try to ensure images render OK. Many feeds have images as relative urls, e.g. "/images/photo.jpg" This won't work in email, and so FeedBLitz tries to convert it to something that works "http://someserver.com/images/photo.jpg" - most of the time it works, sometimes it doesn't, but there are a lot of feeds we're forwarding that were never built with email in mind (who does?) and so there are many issues to be fixed up. Email support and we'll check your feed in particular.
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