FewBar.com – Make it good

Queues seem to be all over the place right now. Maybe its like when I wanted a VW GTi VR6 a few years back. I kept seeing them pass me on the freeway and thought “crap, everybody is getting this hot new thing and I’m missing out!”.

I think everybody at one point looked at MySQL and tought.. “that would work fine as a queue system”. For low volume stuff, it *is* fine. But then somebody grabs your little transactional, relational, reliable queue system and plugs 5 million messages per hour through it, and somewhere, a man name Heikki cries.

So then you start to look around.. and for those of us who have meager budgets and tend to use open source, there aren’t a lot of choices. › Continue reading

If you’re an engineer, you hate testing. Seriously, who likes doing what those mere mortal “users” do? We’re POWER users and we don’t need to use all those silly features on all those sites. Just look at Craigslist, clearly an engineer’s dream tool.

For web apps, testing actually isn’t *that* hard. The client program (the browser) is readily available on every platform known to man, and they generally don’t do much more than store and retrieve data in clever ways. So, its not like we have to fire up a Large Hadron Collider to observe the effects of our web app. › Continue reading

We had a fun time this week with TokyoTyrant. Recently it has become apparent that MemcacheDB has been all but abandoned. As fantastic as the early work was by Steve Chu, the project is in disrepair. That, coupled with the less than obvious failover for its replication combined to make us seek alternatives.

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It semeed so simple, just setup two memcachedb instances and point them at eachother. Instant fault tolerance, Right? If only it were so simple!

Its not entirely clear from the documentation how to setup memcachedb for fault tolerance. Here’s the procedures I’ve found useful.
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So, I was working on getting Facebook’s seemingly amazing Scribe logging architecture setup to check it out. One of the requirements it has is ‘fb303′, which is included with Thrift in the contrib directory. I ran into this:
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So I was starting to play with Memcached for session storage, and I found a fairly big problem with justing memcached in its normal caching mode as a session store. It really just boils down to caching and storing of deterministic data being very different things that only look similar on the surface.
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