ProjectX Blog

The guys from misshapenfeatures have created a movie that highlights the foo camp experience.

Enjoy!

I thought I’d do a write up on one of the technical sessions at Foo Camp, Artur Bergman’s of Sixapart fame on “How to run big f**king websites”. Being a system admin / network architect in a previous life, I found it very very interesting. As you know from my previous articles, I’m obsessed with website optimisation and make webpages faster.

Background

Sixapart run a number of large scale websites, typepad, movabletype, vox and livejournal. Artur provided some stats on livejournal to give us an idea of how big these site are. eg. There are 2,000,000 Typepad users and at any given instant there are about 500,000 people reading LiveJournal, with 100,00 to 200,000 live http connections!

How do they do it ?

One of the key concepts that Artur talked about was using software to manage application and operating redundancy. (Chris Di Bona also confirmed that they use software to manage redundancy at Google). Artur didn’t pull an punches, he slammed nearly every hardware manufacturer, raid system and file system. The problem as they have experienced is that all hardware or software drivers fail at one time or another. Why should they waste money on buying more expensive kit ? Does price really contribute to reliability? For SixApart, it has been better for them to buy cheap hardware ie machines, memory, hard drives etc. and solve reliability and redundancy via software.

Software Tools

Arthur spoke a lot about four tools that they have developed to help run their sites and keep them fast!

Memcache is a distributed memory cache that reduces hits to your database. (I have it on good authority that Yahoo and Google are heavily using memcache to speed up their sites.) Memcache stores “objects” in memory for access within your application, thus with some smart design you can dramatically reduce the number of hits on the database. Arthur warned that memcache does require a little bit of care when managing the expiry of your cache objects.

MogileFS is a distributed filesystem. MogileFS is flexible ie. it requires no kernel extensions and it is filesystem agnostic and it provides “better than raid” as it manages the distribution of files not only across disks but also machines. In this way it has been designed so that there is no single point of failure.

Perlbal is a Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server. Perlbal can be used to manage http connections among servers. It can act as a webserver or a reverse proxy. They have built in the smarts so that Perlbal can handle resuming downloads and connecting to another backend servers if one stream fails.

Gearman is a system to farm out work to other machines. It dispatches function calls to machines to do work in parallel and to load balance lots of function calls.

Wrap-up

It was an amazing talk to hear first hand what what worked and what didn’t and why they have developed the tools to make their site fast. The amazing thing is that Sixapart guys have released their software as open source for the benefit of the rest of us!

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We’ve been talking to a lot of our users and we realise that we let a bugs and glitches slip into the system. Due to one thing or another they haven’t been fixed and as a result ZoomIn is not as good as it should be. We’ve decided that enough is enough, so we started an internal project to fix the broken windows.

To start with we are making a list, when its finished we’ll post it on the blog and keep you updated as we make progress.
So we want you to tell us what is broken, annoying, or frustrating on ZoomIn.

To kick things off, here’s the start of our list:

• Search – Inconsistent results when trying to find a street number in a long street eg. Great South Road
• Search – Auto-suggest does not find all results
• Aerial Photography – Bring back aerial photography !
• Email: Fix email map to a friend
• URLs: Make sure that all the ZoomIn url’s are friendly and don’t have %20 etc
• Place Page: Stop munging place names

Finally, thanks for your patience. We’re working on fixing our problems, let us know what you want us to fix and we’ll add it the list.

Tim has created some examples of using GText to show the potential of what you can do.

Tim Haines have a look at example 1 for an answer to your question about zoom levels.

Sarah has posted a summary of Tomek’s Summer of Code Seminar – The Zen of Code Management.
We’ll get Tomek to add his slides shortly.

Chris Di Bona of Google and Slashdot fame (and the “father” of the Google Summer of Code) is presenting to Creative HQ Summer of Code on Wednesday.

Date: Wednesday 7th February 2007 @ 12:00pm
Location:Old Government Buildings, Lambton Quay, Room GBLT03
Map: http://www.zoomin.co.nz/

The event kicks off at 11.30am in GBG07 for some refreshments and rendezvous, followed by a seminar
in GBLT3. Its open to the public but as seats are limited, please RSVP to sarah@summerofcode.co.nz.

We’re having lot’s of fun at Foo Camp. It’s a total geek fest and great opportunity to drill into a wide variety of topicswith amazing people. I have been taking lots of pictures and will post them up once I get back.

Rather than adding my 2 cents on Broadband and other debates. (The government is starting to make some traction on levelling the playing, and I’m really happy to see things progressing.) I ‘d like to say what’s happening about Mobile pricing ? I’ve ranted to lots of people about my experiences in India and how cheap pricing for data and fair royalties for mobile services has led to massive choice of mobile applications.

The market is not servering our needs, when will the commerce commission or government stepping in ? I want to telecom / voadfone is think long and allow content providers to build applications. The big question is how long do we have to wait ?

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We’ve just updated the API to enable users to add text directly on top of the maps. The new API function is called GText. You have the ability to customise the size and style of the text via css. Check out the example
page to see what you can do.

Kudos to Tim for his work.

Tomek, Nick and I will be up at Baa Camp this weekend.

Lot’s of interesting topics to talk about, and we’ll be bring a little demo for show and tell.

Looking forward to meeting lots of new people.