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Some of you may have noticed the hour that Fluther was down this afternoon. I thought I’d give you a little insight into what we’ve been I’ve been up to while Bacio fiddles the bits on the server.
Not wanting anyone to accuse us of not running with the cool kids, I decided to implement a STOMP messaging queue system* for Fluther in November. Now, whenever a question gets asked we can offload the matching algorithm to a different machine. The result? You get a much snappier Fluther.
I’ve also rewritten our twisted-based notify server to use the message queue as well, so watch out for better emails when there’s activity on your questions.
Here’s how this afternoon went down. Many of these steps are run automatically using our custom capistrano scripts:
In practice, there were a few snags (mostly dependency issues with the new codebase), but overall everything is running very smoothly now.
* The messaging system is a customized version of Brian Rosner‘s engine library and resembles starling — it’s pluggable for different queue types, provides a nice interface for deferring functions, and has sample clients that consume messages off the queue. Let me know if this interests you!
I just love it when you speak computer-ese. Thanks for all you’re doing to make the site better!