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Saturday, July 21, 2007

The Hacker's Diet Online: 350 accounts, cluster support in production

Yesterday, Moon Day, 2007-07-20, The Hacker's Diet Online passed the milestone of more than 350 users. The Web application entered beta test on April 29th, and went into production on July 2nd, at which time it had about 100 beta test users.

Since then, new users have piled on with an “uptake” I haven't seen since the early days of AutoCAD. Today, I put a new version of the Web application into production which implements automatic replication of its databases across all machines in a “server farm” of the kind which drives the Fourmilab site. In fact, since synchronisation among peer servers is accomplished via open and secure tools such as ssh and scp, there is no requirement that servers be located at the same site nor use the same operating system: as long as it supports Perl, has a vaguely Unix-like file system, and allows SSH connections, a machine is (server) farm-fresh ready.

Thanks to the file system based database architecture of the application, it's unlikely this update will destabilise anything. Nonetheless, I shall be monitoring the log throughout the week-end to see if anything untoward eventuates. If you observe any anomalies, please report them with the in-application feedback form.

Posted at July 21, 2007 01:40