My Opera News

Just in time for Christmas we've released an update for My Opera, this time codenamed Elderberry. (Btw here's a recipe for making Elderberry jam in case you needed that)


This release's changes include:

• Activity feed updated, "Home" is now your home on My Opera.
  
• New Community section with more featured content.
  
• Group news now in the activity feed.
  
• Twitter sidebar integration.
  
• YouTube API is now used to display video thumbnails for Opera Mini
  
• My Opera optimization for mobiles and smaller screens, with media queries.
  
• Updated photo tagging. Sorting of tags and opt-out.
  
• Updated CSS customize tool.
  
• Opera Unite updates.
  
• 2 GB storage for everyone.
  
• Parsing fixes: Dreaded _('') problems, entities not escaped when text is truncated
  
• Increasing modularity of file accesses from backends
  
• Featured news page where we can showcase things we think you would like to see.
  
• Removed technorati ping support
  
• Security issue with forum when set to restricted
  
• CSS files optimizations (concatenates css files for less accesses)
  
• Issues with encoding and caching pages led to empty pages
  
• Blocked users showed up in recent visitors page
  
• [DevOpera] New CC licenses
  
• Forum feeds not visible for non-admins
  
• Some HTMl validation fixes
  
• Stricter on filetypes allowed as usercss
  
• Too much escaping of entities in blog entries
  
• Soft limit on signature lengths
  
• Timezone fixes for activity feed
  
• MMS blogging character encoding fixes
  
• Jump to correct comment after editing it.
  
• Stricter validation on various user provided fields
  
• Don't show your own status updates if feed is empty
  
• [DevOpera] Share article button
  
• Show full name in comments
  
• Fixes for narrow screens
  
• [DevOpera] fixes for tag links
  
• Spaces in group names shown properly
  
• Variable speed dial size support
  
• Fixes for internal reports
  
• Some DB load balancing fixes
  
• Improve caching of "static" pages for various user agents
  
• Better grouping of activity feed entries
  
• [DevOpera] Editing tags led to faulty URLs
  
• [DevOpera] Editing articles led to old SEO URL b0rk
  
• Some Twitter status parsing fixes
  
• Fixes for customizing page background
  
• Phototagging fixes
  
• Add blogID to RSD files
  
• More correct avatar caching
  
• Allow Favorites and Unite as default pages
  
• Future group blog posts should not show up
  
• Various fixes for alignments and layout in MSIE
  
• [DevOpera] Search results showed up double encoded
  
• And much more \o/
  

PS: We know about some remaining encoding issues, and will try to fix them as soon as possible ;-)
PPS: Most encoding issues should've been fixed.

The scheduled database maintenance was completed on Saturday. Well, it wasn't exactly maintenance, but rather an important change of setup. Now My Opera is running on a master to master replication setup, instead of the classic master-slave that has been running for some years now.

There's at least 2 good reasons why we chose that setup:

• it allows for database master maintenance with practically no downtime, since you can have the site run on your secondary master, while the primary is taken offline. When maintenance is over, you can switch back to the primary.
  
• in case of disaster or failures to the primary master, the secondary can kick in (manually for now) in a rather short time. Last time we had a primary master db crash, it took us something around 4-6 hours to be back online.
  

So, currently My Opera is running on the secondary master database, while the primary is being prepared. "Being prepared" in this case means that we're converting some of our heavy duty tables to the InnoDB storage engine. This was really needed because MyISAM table-level locking poses some hard limits on concurrency and scalability of your database, even if it's very fast. Add that we have more user activity, APIs and services than ever before, and you have the whole picture.

Of course, all this work should also improve raw performance of the site. Once we get back to our primary master server, which we will probably do in the next few days, the site will be definitely faster. Not ludicrous speed yet, but faster

It's been a while since we deployed the first static server for My Opera.
It was a really necessary step, because we had, and we continue to have, lots of static resources to be served.
A while back, most of these resources were served by applications, causing much more load on servers than necessary.
Now most of the heaviest ones have been already moved to the static servers.

Some months ago we also added support for partitioning of the user resources in our storage software layer. That means making sure that if we have the need to scale serving of resources on different machines, we can either replicate the entire content on different ones, or split the content over 2 or more machines. That part worked nicely so far. That's why at some point there was a static.myopera.com and static02.myopera.com.

Now there's also static03.myopera.com

We changed our setup again, transparently (for you users), to consolidate the previously recycled/temporary hardware into a new shiny machine with more disk space. On this machine, we installed lighttpd instead of our usual Apache setup. We wanted to try out this software. For us it was the first time we tried it on a production setup.

Edoardo played with it for a while, prepared the setup and installed it on static03. As of today, it has been running perfectly for nearly 1 month with a really low load, and peaks of 250 accesses per second. It's serving around 14M hits per day for avatars, user pictures, skin thumbnails, etc...