After a week and a half of jury duty (not guilty!) and a super busy week in the office last week (writing code, testing code, shopping for PR agency) things are getting back on track. We have a big release this week. In this post I’m going to talk about the big change that I hope you don’t notice. We’ll be rolling out our high availability/scalability solution over the next two weeks. (CDN sales guys: this is not an implied request to have you call me and try to sell me your solution. Again.) Call us optimists, but we think that in the next couple of months you’ll be hearing about some major partnership deals that will dramatically increase our traffic and it would be nice if we were ready for the traffic.

I’d like to thank Brad Fitzpatrick at Danga/Live Journal for sharing the tools and architecture that they use at Live Journal. It’s great to be able to take advantage of the expertise of others. We hope that we can contribute some software back to the cause with our Python MogileFS wrapper and some PerlBal plug-ins. Stay tuned, we will have a labs page up soon. We’re also big fans of Cal Henderson’s conference sessions and his book–go check it out.

Currently, Picnik is running on a single web server and two DB servers. Starting this week, we (primarily Justin and I) will be rolling out our solution that allows us to scale horizontally and take advantage of all of those other servers in our rack. The first piece of the puzzle is the PicnikFS wrapper that encapsulates MogileFS and is a first step to taking advantage of off-site storage like Amazon’s S3. Once we’re happy with the stability of PicnikFS we’ll turn on PerlBal and start load balancing across several Web servers. The last piece of the software puzzle falls into place when we separate our rendering code from the web server and get it running on our 4/8 core boxen.

For what it’s worth, our existing box has done a great job. No major hiccups even when we got crunch’d and photojojo‘d.

We’re also tweaking our upload code to elimiate some of the errors that a small percentage of you have been seeing. Please send email to feedback if you see any errors uploading your pictures.

Darrin, Peter and Brian also have lots of goodies ready for the next release, more on that in my next post.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under tools, picnik. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.