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RSSmeme Blog

Finding signal in the noise

RSSmeme on FriendFeed and TwitterFebruary 28

You can now get RSSmeme on FriendFeed and Twitter. This isn't the whole RSSmeme firehose; it's a bit more selective than what appears on just http://www.rssmeme.com/. I'll be tweaking it to find the appropriate settings that makes for a pleasant experience.

The ff.im links that appear in Twitter go directly to the story source.

Database maintenanceOctober 26 2008

I truncated the database and added a few more indexes to RSSmeme that will hopefully improve stability. Some people were using the API in ways that I didn't expect and adding the indexes to the database without truncating it first would have taken hours/days to finish; since RSSmeme isn't mission critical I decided to start fresh! RSSmeme should "auto discover" your Google Reader shared feed all over again (the stats page shows we've already found 1200 in the last hour).

Stop the dog-pile: freshen your cacheJuly 30 2008

It's no question that RSSmeme has been gaining in popularity. With increased visitors comes increased load and with that comes increased wait times. RSSmeme caches the data that comes out of database for several minutes to keep things snappy but let's look at what happens when that cache gets old. Under the old, simplistic system:

1. The home page cache gets old and stale.
2. 50 visitors request the home page at the same exact time.
3. The server gets clogged running the exact same query for all 50 visitors.
4. Meanwhile more visitors hit other pages and nobody ever gets results because the server is overloaded; the dog-pile effect.

Under the new, system (using MintCache):

1. The home page cache gets old.
2. 50 visitors request the home page at the same exact time.
3. The 1st visitor triggers a database query to get fresh data. The other 49 get the now slightly stale data. Only 1 call has been made to the database.
4. The cache is updated with the fresh data that was sent to the 1st visitor and everyone is happy.

It's slightly more complicated but the results are already promising. Hopefully this keeps RSSmeme speedy.

Search RSS feeds and JSON disabledJuly 11 2008

RSSmeme has been slowing down over the last few days and my brief analysis looks like it's due to a lot of people using the search RSS feeds and API. Unfortunatly I've had to disable the search parameter for any format other than the standard HTML that RSSmeme displays.

I'll hopefully be able to restore this soon but in the meantime all of you using complicated Yahoo Pipes filters with RSSmeme might not be seeing results that you'd expect. Sorry.

Update: The personalize feature has also been disabled while I test things out.

Update: RSS and JSON re-enabled. Personalized feature still disabled.

10 days and 10000 new users laterJune 30 2008

Exactly 10 days ago I wrote about RSSmeme crossing the 20000 user barrier. Today RSSmeme has over 30000 users!