Ping-O-Matic

The first wave of new servers just came online. We’ll be configuring them and moving the site over tonight, so there may be some funkiness in the interim.

UPDATE: Move complete. Let’s see how this new hardware holds up.

Geeklog 1.4 now pings Ping-O-Matic by default. Woohoo!

Imagine my surprise when I visited Grabperf (like I do daily) and saw Ping-O-Matic in the top 20 fastest sites that they’re tracking. You can view a scatter chart of Ping-O-Matic performance and see it tends be right around .20 total which currently puts us behind BBC and ahead of Google search. Cool. 🙂

I’m not quite done with the performance tweaks yet, but it will probably be mostly on the outgoing ping side of thing, which shouldn’t effect the graphs that much. Once everything is done on the single box, I’ll start the process of replicating it to the other donated hardware. Performance is nice, but availability is more important.

All of the internal parts of Ping-O-Matic have been switched over to use the new functions I wrote, and I’ll be eliminating more of the old code in the next day or two, which should continue to improve performance.

Sorry for some of the bumps over the weekend, some of you may have caught me while the code was being debugged and seen strange messages or behaviour. As the first “hard part” is now over, these should be a lot less than they used to be.

I just (finally) found the lingering bug that would cause people to get a “you’re pinging too fast” when in fact they actually hadn’t been. It was related to how we stored the latest pings and how new blogs were added to the database.

So far I’ve removed about 400 lines from the code, and taking out more and more. After it’s been broken down to its simplest possible parts I’ll begin replicating it to the other servers.

Ping-O-Matic is running again, however the blog will now be here instead of on the pingomatic.com domain. (To make it easier to distribute the app amoung multiple servers and not have to keep so much synced.)

Sorry for the downtime, it was actually NOT related to the plans for a new architecture, the problem was the pings were overloading the network stack (really) on the old box, so we moved it to a better box and put some protections in front of it.

There will be more updates over the weekend, I’ll be blogging the news as it happens. The hardware from Technorati will finally be brought online and I have a few other optimizations in mind.