Join the Blog Buzz Machine beta
The form for joining the Blog Buzz Machine beta is up right here.
The form for joining the Blog Buzz Machine beta is up right here.
Blog Buzz Machine's RPC server got hit 5.5 million times last month. It's just insane to me (especially since the site is running on some very limited hardware). I've got the RPC site down for the time being, the blog pings have been overwhelming the web server (I've been restarting every couple of hours). New hardware is coming this week, hopefully it'll alleviate some of the growing pains we've been having. In the meantime, why don't you send me an email at brian.kirsten.bss@gmail.com asking to be part of BBM's beta test?
So last night the web server Blog Buzz Machine is hosted on slowed to a crawl. As the site grows I was seeing more and more slowdown out of both the DB and Web servers. I'd been doing a ton of research on MySQL database tuning in the hope of squeezing some more performance out of the 2 little machines I'm using to run the site. I realized that I stupidly created the database for the system using MyISAM for the storage engine. The plus to it was it supported FULLTEXT indexes which would prove useful for the search side of things. Sadly though after much beating up of the database server I realized that the way MyISAM was working, it was locking up one of the main tables for selects, causing any updates or inserts to queue up (causing maximum connection issues) which ended up slowing the server down. I started looking for other options. I started playing with InnoDB about a week ago, it's a bit more like Oracle (with row-level locking/transactions) and I came across several articles on the wonderfull-ness of InnoDB so I figured I would give it a try. What a change....last night I finished moving the main tables to InnoDB and the difference is like night-and-day. My only gripe is that InnoDB doesn't seem to support FULLTEXT indexes so I'll need to figure out something with that. But hopefully the system as a whole seems a bit quicker, plus we're up to over 475,000 pinging blogs now. This little programming experiment has turned into a whole lot of work!
I've added "Most Popular Blogs" to Blog Buzz Machine, it features (duh) the most popular blogs in the Blog Buzz Machine universe. I currently have folks beta testing some of the other neat features of Blog Buzz Machine. Want to be added to the beta test? Email me at brian.kirsten.bss@gmail.com to join the Beta test team.
Brian Kirsten is an entrepreneur, software engineer, writer and publisher. He currently owns Brain Scan Studios, a digital media company focused on publishing comic books and graphic novels. He’s recently launched FictFact with his wife, Christine Kirsten.
