Code Emitter

I have to revise everything I said about varnish before. Meanwhile it is too hard to count the number of times, that I had to restart my instances in the last few weeks and especially today. While packet loss keeps increasing inside the Hetzner network, varnish more and more shows up as a real problem, refusing to serve images randomly with increasing frequency.

I used Varnish till today to cache images hosted on S3, but I am finally so absolutely disappointed (mostly because our users are also with us just because of varnish), that I decided to go back to good ol’ lighttpd with a proxy and caching solution I wrote in PHP (like I did before). The initial reason to switch over to varnish was, that I searched for an uncomplicated way of proxying the images to save bandwidth costs including that I do not have to touch the servers every week like I did before, but unfortunately I ended up touching them twice a day just to restart Varnish. I don’t even dare to think about the traffic peaks caused by this and all the hours I lost while logging into several servers.

I guess this is a clear case of “if you don’t do everything yourself”. However, I completely rewrote my own caching solution, made it completely independent of the backend systems and implemented a SQLite database into every instance so that it’s possible to let it clean up itself once a day via a cron job and generate some basic statistics. -> “Minimal Image Proxy 2″ was born and is already running on our image servers. It’s 3,2kb zipped.

Sigh. Finally I am really looking forward to get some peace of mind and significantly lower traffic bills from Amazon now. And it definitely feels really good again to replace troublemaking programs by a hand-crafted beautiful piece of specialiced software.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently - I have just been busy with a lot of everyday life and the following projects. Short and sweet:

Only a few days ago we started Rockz.com (”Me rockz, you rockz, we rockz.com!”) on top of our virtunity|cs plattform as a sister project for schlach.com but using a much more common name. Say hello! :)

We also launched our very own corporate website at virtunity.com - so feel free to take a look at it, too.

Bye for now! :)

Seit rund 14 Tagen läuft die Community nun bereits auf dem virtunity-System und ich muss wirklich sagen: Eine solch reibungslose Umstellung hätte ich gar nicht erwartet :-). Hat sowohl technisch wie auch logistisch dank der Mitarbeit vieler fleißiger Teammember prima geklappt.

Die Resonanz war zudem erfreulich positiv, das kann man sich so wirklich nur wünschen. Ich denke, dass wir alles in allem den Puls der Zeit und die Erwartungen unserer Nutzer auf einen gemeinsamen Nenner gebracht haben, der sich sehen lässt und absolut einzigartig im Web ist.

Es ist wahrscheinlich gerade die Klasse, die das gesamte Projekt ausmacht. Es ist keine unüberschaubare Massenveranstaltung, jedes Detail sitzt am richtigen Fleck, irgendwie kennt man jeden nur um ein paar Ecken und jeder, der etwas verbessern möchte, findet beim Team und mir immer ein offenes Ohr und ist einfach ganz nah dran. Das ist einfach “Gemeinschaft, wie sie sein sollte” :-).

Jeder, der ein wenig Zeitvertreib sucht oder sich bei den Platzhirschen zu Tode langweilt, sei hiermit natürlich auch herzlich eingeladen. Let’s rock!