Monday, September 8th, 2008

Server Upgrade Progress

It’s been a while since anything has been posted - this is a big no-no in the world of blogging.  I know this, but really when you’re hammering away at work during the day and then hacking PHP and SQL in the evenings, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the all-important communication that users need.  The Snapact team plans to improve our communication with you once we get the first public release out there - we promise.  Now, some news:

I am happy to report that we have made some major strides in the couple of weeks.  We’ve migrated our static content hosting to S3 to offset the bandwidth and server load from our main web server, which - in a somewhat humorous fashion - has been located in my closet at home up until yesterday.  www.Snapact.com has been in testing, and I had a great system for it sitting at home… a piddly little 1.6ghz, 396mb RAM, 120gb hard drive machine.  Perfect to see if all of the PHP and DB script would bog it down - and guess what?  It proved to be an excellent choice!

That junky little machine was handy in identifying the need for caching DB results in memory; it also helped to identify the need to offload static content to an external server.  All that having been said, it has reached the end of its public involvement with www.Snapact.com - but please, don’t worry about its future.  It will continue on merrily as a development and staging system!

Some details of how we’re currently operating:

• The PHP website is hosted via www.Slicehost.com (referral link - feel free to sign up via the link; it helps us with our hosting costs!).  These guys ROCK.  A great virtualized setup, easily upgradable, affordable and very flexible.  That, and their website is very pretty.
• The Upload from the Snapact browser is done via www.AmazonAWS.com’s EC2.  This is a great way to get items into S3 with only a single hit of uploading bandwidth.
• www.AmazonAWS.com’s S3 is where Snapact stores your photos for the website to reference.  Having the user photos as well as the Snapact CSS, Javascript and miscellaneous other static files for the website lets the PHP website hosted by Slicehost be fast and focused.

On the Snapact website server, we use a couple of caching mechanisms:

• MySQL has some built in caching that’s done - but I don’t count that…
• XCache is a PHP plugin that caches the compiled PHP script pages (preventing future interpretation)
• Memcached is a distributed, in-memory caching system cleverly devised to share any sort of cached information across multiple servers.  This is where many of the database query results will get stored in order to prevent redundant database hits.

All in all, while there are further optimizations possible (and planned), this is the foundation from which we will launch into the public.  Both Amazon EC2 and Slicehost offer multiple avenues for scalability, so we feel fairly well prepared for our growth.

We look forward to opening up Snapact for users to use; in the future, we really look forward to having developers build on our platform using a planned developer API.  Exciting times call for … sharing.  Photo sharing.