Posts tagged as “behind-the-scenes”
As of early June, del.icio.us officially added me into the mix. Since joining the team, my tasks have included building new servers, taking James to the Shake Shake, setting up various network monitoring utilities, eating with the VCs at the Shake Shack, coding, sitting in a lawn chair dreaming of the Shake Shack, and starting a new diet.
Yesterday, I racked five new servers, bringing the current total up to 14. This will allow us to implement some power-hungry new features within the coming week or so.
July 19th, 2005
We will be moving to new serversWe will be moving to new servers on Sunday, June 5 starting at noon EST and hopefully completing by 4 PM. The site will be unavailable during this time.
Updates will be posted to this blog during that time, and we will also have live status at #delicious on irc.del.icio.us.
update 12:02 pm EDT: I’ve brought down the website and begun the database backup. This part takes about 20 minutes.
update 12:27 pm EDT: I’m moving the backups to the new server and restoring the backup. This takes about 20-60 minutes depending on the network.
update 12:40 pm EDT: I’ve begun restoring the database on the new servers. This takes about 30 minutes.
update 1:03 pm EDT: I’ve begun rebuilding the tag indices (this is faster than restoring them.) There are two of them and they take about one hour each.
update 2:31 pm EDT: I’ve begun rebuilding the second index.
update 4:04 pm EDT: The new servers are up. Some functionality is missing and will come online over the next few hours, including Related Tags, Search and Inbox.
update 6:12 pm EDT: I misconfigured something and some users were seeing the “banned” messages. Hopefully this is fixed, please let me know if you see any further problems.
update Monday, 12:02pm EDT: Looks like everything caught up overnight. The inbox is slowly replaying, should catch up in a day or two.
June 2nd, 2005
Two years ago, Joshua and I were discussing ideas for something very similar to del.icio.us. In fact, it was del.icio.us as Joshua wrote the first version shortly afterwards. The conversations and the pleasant pattern continued - I got to talk a lot, Joshua did all the actual work and every now and then, one of my suggestions would magically wind its way into the site.
Earlier this year, as Joshua was considering taking on investment and working on del.icio.us full-time, he asked me if I’d be interested in joining the yet-nonexistent company. I thoughtlessly said “Yeah, sure” much in the way you might say “Yeah, sure” if approached by a hobbyist musician friend and asked if you’d like to fly around the world and party on his private jet when he becomes a mega-rockstar.
This carelessness has cost me dearly as I now find myself at the del.icio.us office, krazy-glued to a lawnchair with no hope of escape until I implement the top 50 features demanded by del.icio.us users, starting with ‘free pony for every 100 bookmarks’.
May 24th, 2005
In the two years that I’ve been running delicious, I’ve had to move the site to bigger and faster hardware every few months as it grew. Originally it ran on a little celeron machine that I use for all my various projects, and just a few months later, it moved to a very, very loud dual Xeon IBM intellistation, where it was happy for a while. unfortunately, I had chosen to go with FreeBSD 4, which caused a lot of problems with the MySQL backend.
In January of 2005, we moved moved to an HP sent to me by a friend, colocated in a real ISP somewhere in downtown Manhattan. I added to that an inexpensive single-CPU Dell for running apache and so on.
Once again we find ourselves out of hardware, so we have procured five new dual-Xeon servers from Dell and three new dual-Opteron machines from Sun. On Monday, we’ll be moving them to the colo facility. Hopefully in the coming weeks they’ll be online and the site will, once again, move to bigger and faster hardware.
May 13th, 2005
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