By Cosimo Streppone.
Wednesday, 18. March 2009, 15:52:50
servers, development, apricot, optimization
...
After we cut down the database size by an impressive 22 Gb yesterday (and we had our share of problems afterwards, as you probably noticed...), we managed to get some performance-related fixes out live.
According to our monitoring tools, all the servers are running faster and with lot less load than ever before. Of course, it's not going to last long, because traffic is slowly but continuously increasing. At least it should give us some more time to relax a bit (read: dedicate only to development stuff...).
For the curious among you, I've attached a screenshot of one of our own monitoring tools. A pity you can't see the realtime updates. This is taken at peak time, and it shows load, active threads and replication status for each machine. It shows most of the My Opera backend machines:
where green stuff is OK, while orange or red is not.
To add more fun, one of our main database servers has been repeatedly crashing during the weekends (mostly friday and saturday nights, super-fun!). Most of the time My Opera has been up and running without being affected. Today this server was updated with a brand new kernel and disk driver version. It shouldn't crash anymore. Now we're pushing it at full speed. Let's see...
By Cosimo Streppone.
Thursday, 10. July 2008, 08:26:11
spammers, optimization, throttling
Lately we have been targeted by some bad spammers that fill their "wonderful" blogs with hundreds of posts about pharmacy, nurse schools and other crappy stuff. They probably use semi-automated tools, and for several reasons, this drains server and database power for "the good guys".
This is the reason for so many
proxy errors and site slowdown...
But don't despair! We have just sent live an optimization regarding new blog posts that should hopefully help the database a bit when these spammers hammer us.
We're also working to some sort of
throttling that should slowdown people from posting in their blogs if the frequency of post is like 1000/minute or something :-)
I think no legit user, apart maybe from
Tamil, is able to do that... :-)
By Fredrik Andersson.
Sunday, 25. November 2007, 17:00:51
optimization, ui, speed
I've spend the last few days optimizing My Opera for faster loading, using the 14 rules from Steve Souders (Yahoo!) excellent book High Performance Web Sites.
I saw Nate Koechley from Yahoo! present these rules at a Web conference in London a long time ago and I've wanted to implement them since then, but I had not got around to it until earlier this week when Sverre got the book and put it on my desk. 
There's much that can be done to speed up My Opera. We have done a few things already, such as moving all scripts to the bottom of the page, and we aim to do a lot more in the future.
For this My Opera update I've decided to focus on getting fewer HTTP requests and smaller files sizes for the My Opera ui.
If we take a closer look at the images that are used for the My Opera ui today we can see that it's 27 images (depending on what page you look at) with a total file size of 71,3 KB. That's the backgrounds for the main layout, the logo, menu, icons for the top bar, tabs for sub menus, etc (I'm only including the images that are used for the ui, not the ones in the page content).
The challenge with optimizing this is that the ui for the upcoming My Opera release will contain even more icons than before, because of the drop down menus, and we still needed to make it smaller.
So, how do you think it went?
Quite well actually. The result for the new site is 8 images and 21,8 KB!
There is of course a lot more that can be done, and we will continue working on this.
Stay tuned for more posts on this topic.
WIDGETIZE