My Opera News

The Apricot release is now stabilized, after a few days of problems here and there.

The good thing is that we learned something more. The bad thing is that it took us a couple of days to realize what the real problem was.

I always like to say that My Opera becomes stronger and faster only after some "crisis" moments. It's those performance/stability/whatever problems that demand highest attention and you have to do something to fix them, no matter what. So, whatever doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. :-)

Initially, we thought the problems were in the new friends system code. After careful inspection and partial rewrite of both Sidebar and Friends components, it became evident that the problem had another cause. As many other sites, we use memcached on several machines. It acts as a distributed cache store that makes the site faster and able to serve more requests with the same hardware resources.

Before we started the emergency rewrite of the Sidebar module, we decided to take a closer look at the class that was handling the memcached connections and queries. What we found out (part of what My Opera is today is still legacy stuff for us...) is that this class was issuing a new connection to our memcached server each and every time we queried some data. This is obviously not optimal, so we decided to keep persistent connections to the servers.

As of now, we restored all the functionality in Sidebar and Friends. Sidebar and Friends data is now present on much more pages than before, and that means more backend power needed to serve the same pageviews. We also have a lot more features and queries to the database, but still we're able to cope with the traffic, which is btw quickly increasing.

The Sidebar in particular was broken because when we introduced caching for it, it happened that the same (cached) version of the Sidebar content was used for the /albums/ and for the /blog/ page, which is completely wrong. Now we keep two separate copies because they can, and will, be different. The Sidebar content is also kept in the cache for 30 minutes at most, unless you change your sidebar settings. The recent visitors list didn't update because of this caching. Now everything should be back to normal.
We will probably make sure that your sidebar is updated when you write a new blog post or when there's a new comment, etc... For now this is just planned...

In the meanwhile, our monitoring team (LOL) noticed that at peak time and at some random moments in the day, the site slows down for a couple of minutes, and then everything is back to normal. We're working to solve this by optimizing the code even more. Without breaking anything, if possible... :-)

Big surprises ahead... And you don't know the super-secret feature yet... :-)