Scheduled Maintenance this Wednesday
I need to move the servers to a new dedicated rack with plenty of free slots to be able to add more servers in the future without downtime.
While I'm having capacity to serve at least 2x more load without any hassle, I need to be able to scale the system easy.
Unfortunately, my hosting provider can't directly connect racks or guarantee steady high speed between racks. While it's possible to move servers without downtime I'm afraid there can be problems with a speed and stability of the service. So I decided to move them at once. There is also an option to use Riak Enterprise to make an online copy of the database but it costs much more than a few hours of downtime.
BazQux Reader is running on 8 powerful dedicated servers at the moment. While it could seem to be quite a low number it's actually 256GB RAM, 4TB SSD and 64 cores total. There are 8 even more powerful servers waiting to join in the new rack and there is still a free space for more servers.
So if you wonder why there were not many new features during the last few weeks -- it's because of I'm working on scaling the system. BazQux Reader is probably the fastest reader on market and I'm working proactively to maintain this state (while fixing little bugs, answering ton of mails and implementing new features ;).
And the next week I'm planning to finally implement auto removing of expired free trial accounts (feeds and comments are still fetched for all the people who ever imported subscriptions to BazQux -- that's 10M+ fetches a day), so I can handle even more load.
Then I will turn back to add more features: auto refresh, subscriptions reordering, keyboard navigation in the subscriptions list, more tight integration with sharing/bookmarking services, themes, filtering ... you name it.
And few more news:
- JustReader Android app added support for BazQux. Get it on Google Play.
- Vienna RSS released new Beta that supports BazQux Reader (you probably need to restart it after you set your login & password in sync settings).
- There is a version of RSSOwl (60MB, Mac/Windows) with BQ support (although I found RSSOwl to be very slow on my subscriptions).
- You can open articles in background by pressing 'b' (Chrome/Safari)
- Fixed issue with handling some invalid feeds that previously shown only one post and didn't updated.
- Fixed issue with uploading of large Takeout.zip and uploading in Opera/IE.
Sorry for inconvenience this Wednesday.
10 comments:
(July 14, 2013)
It's a shame that Just Reader is lame. Wonder why there no decent rss apps on android like on iOS...
(July 14, 2013)
What do you mean by "lame"? Is something broken in JustReader?
(July 14, 2013)
Wow. I'm surprised you are running on 8 dedicated servers. I did not expect BazQux to have such a large infrastructure.
And for a service that is running in Germany, it is very responsive here in NYC.
Obvious question, but have you considered cloud services? You don't have to worry as much about hardware availability to scale up...
(July 15, 2013)
I'm having mean request processing time of less than 50msec and median time is 10msec, so no surprise it's working quickly everywhere.
Cloud is generally too costly (look at http://openmymind.net/Why-I-Dislike-ec2/) especially when there are no major spikes in load. Feeds are fetched 24x7 and web part generates order of magnitude less load than a feed fetcher. So I'm having pretty constant load and have no need to dynamically add/remove instances. And there are no cost savings if you don't use cloud dynamically.
Just look at these prices http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex and try to compare how many times more cloud servers of the same power will cost.
(July 15, 2013)
Nope, everything works, though no fullscreen, no nice animations, interface is dull, layout leaves alot to be desired. Overall reading experience sucks. Sure it's better than nothing, but..
Yeah, one day I will learn how to code and make a hell of a RSS reader:-)
Geez, beefy servers, no wonder it's fast. Keep it up:-)
(July 17, 2013)
Of course I didn't read this until I noticed the service was down. I dropped a a little tear in my coffee when I didn't know what I would do with my time this morning but after reading about the infrastructure upgrades I'm a lot more forgiving. How do you make something so great even better?
I personally THANK YOU for Bazqux, I use it about 60 times a day and there's no other like it out there.
(July 17, 2013)
News+ android app is pretty sweet. Same as gReader more or less. Works great with bazqux.
(July 17, 2013)
Thank you! It's online again.
(July 17, 2013)
News+ is getting updated pretty frequently now. I'm still getting a crash every so often but have been sending logs to responsive dev.
Jeff Powell (July 14, 2013)
No worries on my part. Thanks for the advance warning, and keep up the great work!