A Personal Blog
Archive for December, 2005
FeedLounge Responds
Dec 6th
Scott Sanders from FeedLounge responded to my rant from yesterday. Which is nice of him.
He feels that his company is doing the best it can, given a bootstrapped mentality. I can’t argue that, since I don’t know FeedLounge the way I know some of the other Web 2.0 companies. In fact, yesterday was the first time I remember going to their site, so I really can’t say I know them at all.
He says their process was much healthier than my rant claimed:
1. Build a webapp, see if the features are compelling to a set of users, keeping a design in mind that is capable of scaling 2. Overrun the shared server that you are using, switch to dedicated server, so you can properly measure the effects of the application. 3. Add more users, adding requested features from the users, measuring the load in a fixed, known environment, and start work on “Distributed” part of ladder. The is where the build portion of the scalability starts. 4. Now that you believe you have something that has value, invest in the hardware and software development necessary to scale. Continue working on priority based tasks towards release of your product.
While I’m not entirely sure that the app kept in mind a scaleable design from day one, I really can’t argue. And, truth be told, I don’t want to. As long as companies are thinking about scaleability I’m happy.
My rant probably shouldn’t have been so directed at FeedBurner. However I’m running into these scenarios too often where companies suddenly can’t meet the demands of their users and, as a user, it pisses me off. Because, really, there’s no reason for user performance to EVER suffer if all users of your service need to sign up in order to use it, unless you have rogue users. As long as you can turn off user sign up, isn’t it best in the long run for your current users to be happy while you fix issues?
Maybe it’s been too long since I had to build a company from the ground up. But in my mind, if your users come first, then your users need to come first.
It’s slightly harder on folk like Technorati and Feedster who provide open services. And it’s even more challenging for ad networks (who I’ve also spent considerable time with) because if they allow one new publisher in, it can add 30% to the average load overnight.
I guess the low-down is that if you’re a company that provides a service, you either need to be ready to scale or you need to be ready to limit access to your service. Users shouldn’t suffer. But if they do, at least communicate. Thankfully, that’s something FeedLounge does really, really, really well.
I guess they’re made of different stuff than most of the companies I deal with. Best of luck to you guys, and sorry my rant put you in the crosshairs :)
Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale
Dec 5th
I’m not sure when building a scaleable web app became optional. But Feedster, Technorati, Delicious, Google Analytics (and numerous other Google apps of late), BlogPulse and many of the other “big apps” have “suddenly” been hit by scaleability issues.
And so has FeedLounge:
As previously discussed in some depth, we’ve run into all sorts of trouble with scalability. When we began this project, I was working on the interaction design and saw a web based feed reader as “just another web application” – I was dead wrong (Scott already had a better idea about the scale we were looking at, but even he was surprised by what we found). The feed refreshing is a significantly higher load on the system than the actual users are – more like a search engine than a webmail system. We quickly found this out, and it fundamentally changed the way we had to approach the project.
Yeah. Here’s their process:
1. Start with a handful of users. This is too much for ded box. 2. Move to dedicated server. 3. Add a few more users til they’re at 100. This is too much for one box. 4. Add more hardware. It’s obvious this isn’t enough. 5. Recode.
Erm… Hello? Should the recoding have happened after step 1? I mean, if you draw a graph of “okay if we use 10% of a CPU with 10 users, with 100,000 users we’ll need 10K CPU’s” … Something’s wrong.
Maybe I’m just spoiled, having worked in high performance, high availability apps before, but it constantly astounds me what some folk consider “scaleable” and “available” applications. I’ve spent about 10 hours this month working with really, really high profile Web 2.0 ish companies nearly yelling at them about their lack of true infrastructure.
I won’t even get into their code.
It’s funny, because you’d think companies would have learned this lesson years ago. I remember back in the mid part of the .com boom I spent 2 days with Amazon optimizing their front-end code (HTML, JS, CSS, etc). Over 2 days, we trimmed about 50K of weight from it. Nothing major, just smart optimization. It saved them the need for 20 new servers and a major bandwidth upgrade.
Listen up. If your company relies on the web to stay alive, you’d damn well better be using at least some of the following “ladder to high availability”:
Backups, Redundant, Failover, Cluster, Distributed, Grid and finally Mesh
Each step up is a massive increase in cost, but it’s also a massive increase in uptime and such. I hate it when companies say they want 99.9% uptime (or even worse 5 9s of uptime) without thinking about what that’ll cost them.
If your business depends on your website being up, look at your code, look at your infrastructure and for your users sake figure out what you actually need and build the damn thing properly!
Thank you ;-)
Reminder: Backup Your Data
Dec 5th
Just a reminder that you should be backing up your data at least weekly. I bought a nice little external Western Digital 150GB HDD like 3 months ago for backing data up and got so busy I didn’t install it. You’d think I’d know better after frying 3 laptops this year!
Anyways, it’s all setup. Doing nightly differential backups and weekly full backups.
My next step is to figure out how to get mysql to backup to my server nightly , and then to figure out how to automatically get data from the server to our backup server weekly and from the backup server to my HDD monthly.
Hopefully that doesn’t take another 3 months ;-)
Dropping Chitika
Dec 5th
I’ve decided to drop Chitika. My monthly earnings have gone from 500-800$/month to about 70$. I’m not going to slag them off, because they did well for me, but in the last 4-6 weeks Chitika has seriously changed things in the last few months which has resulted in a massive drop in my earnings. Others aren’t experiencing it so much, but I thought I should let folk know.
Microsoft Hits a Home Run with Student 2006
Dec 4th
It isn’t often that one can say Microsoft has “hit a home run”. Even the recent Xbox 360 launch, while fantastic, had serious issues. In reality, most people believe the adage that MS doesnt’ get anything right until the third revision. There are countless examples where that’s wrong (usually it’s the 2nd), but there are enough times it’s right to make it stick.
Marc Orchant’s recent review of Student 2006 (a software package geared towards middle-schoolers) shows that not only has Microsoft hit the mark with this package, they’ve done so better than any other application that exists for this age group.
The review from Marc’s son Jason is great (here’s an excerpt):
From my perspective as a student, Microsoft Student 2006 has been an invaluable tool for reports, school projects, and homework. It’s also a lot of fun to just browse around because there are so many interesting videos, animations, games, and sound clips. I would highly recommend this program to any student who wants to have help for all of their subjects at their fingertips.
And Marc’s low-down is equally glowing (if not more so:
Our bottom line results? Jason has had the best grade reports this first half of the year since entering middle school. He’s less stressed about big projects knowing he has these resources at his disposal. And we’ve found a new and very enjoyable way for me to be involved in his schoolwork. We give Microsoft Student 2006 an enthusiastic two thumbs up!
Considering you can pick up this little tool for 70-100$, it’s really quite hard to argue with. It includes so many tools and so much useful information (like templates and tips and action plans on each major kind of essay middle-school students will likely face) that it’s hard to not go out and buy it for my kids right now (who won’t be entering middle school for at least a decade).
Good job Microsoft, and great review Marc and Jason!
