My Opera News

We're alive!

We read you, of course... It's just that we are terribly busy doing stuff...
No, really. We have already fixed more than 100 bugs and added several new features.
They are just waiting to be released live, because... well, because there's huge changes ahead!

BTW, the throttling measures are in place now. To all of you who asked, throttling is a way to slow down those clients or networks that clearly abuse of our services by mass-spamming or hammering the site with fake search requests and stuff. Now we have those throttling limits in place for some well known IP ranges, so that MyOpera for them just works, but they are limited to 10 requests per second, or whatever we want to...

I can't exactly tell you when we are going to release, but you will be noticed.
And you will certainly notice afterwards.

For Christmas, we guys down here in the monkey dungeon wanted hardware. Even more hardware. A month or so ago we were rumoured to have a very prominent link to the Opera Community on the Nintendo Wii Browser, and we were obviously a tiny bit worried about all the lucky folks getting a Wii under their Christmas tree barging through our doors simultaneously. (I don't think we got a prominent link though. )

So, we already have Bigma and Bigpa. Hence, enter Fatboy:


Fatboy is two IBM x3950 servers virtualised into one brutish 8 Dual Core CPU, 64GB RAM monster. With this solution we'll be able to scale both horizontally (by adding more auxilliary servers) and vertically (by simply stacking more x3950 boxes on top of the ones we have resulting in one logical server with more CPUs).

Fatboy has been fed Debian Etch, and is now currently taking over the role of Bigpa as database serving visitors which are not logged in, while Bigpa is currently put on search query duty. Our trusty Bigma master database server underwent a slight downtime period yesterday to update the firmware of the RAID controller, which will hopefully make her run smoothly through the holidays.

Fatboy originally came delivered from IBM with a puny amount of RAM (3GB), because IBM having some warehouse in Poland being raided or something. So we had to insert all those 32 sticks of RAM ourselves! Manual labour! Below, we have Thomas holding the loot and Sverre feeding it to Fatboy.


We hope by this that we will be able to bring you the gift of gifts this Christmas: a stable Opera Community. Atleast we have tried to stress-test the system, and with significant extra load, it weathered the requests we threw at it well. If, against (according to?) all odds something breaks, we also have 24x7 on-call duty during the holidays in case of any severe problems.

Today was the official opening of the brand spanking new server room on the Opera Software ASA premises. The system administrators were out in full force along with major parts of the Opera Software managment. Obviously, having nothing better to do than eat cake and drink alcohol free champagne, most of the Opera Community team tagged along as well. Claudia from sysadmin had even made a server room cake. Mmmm. Stein claims it is a world's first in server room cakes. I'll take his word for it.

Anyway, the most interesting thing in the server room, is of course the Opera Community rack, as seen to the left. From the top, we have user file storage (the content of files.myopera.com), "bigma" (the master MySQL database server which we so proudly have shown you nudie pics of before with its five 15K RPM striped disks in front loading bays), and two IBM blade centers containing multi-purpose machines (Apache front ends, Apache back ends, slave MySQL database servers, load balancers, file servers, cache servers, sync masters and what have you).

Considering how stuff typically goes down every time I try to brag about our new hardware's perfomance, I won't this time. Actually, on the contrary, I must say that files.myopera.com is performing rather poorly at times of heavy load. We'll need to make someone invest in a proper caching front for that one...

Anyway. With the Opera Community as the only in-production system running in the new server room, it was with a bit of trepidation that we watched Jon flip the switch on the fuses to cut the power to the entire server room. Apparently, this is sysadmin's sick joke of an inauguration ritual. Anyway, the UPSes and the 10 tonnes of battery backup somehow worked fine, the diesel generator kicked in, and the Opera Community survived. Even though the 500A relays were making some rather disturbing noises.

Lastly, here's a couple of more pictures of random server room porn; left is my.opera.com's naked behind and the right are containers of argon gas (for extinguishing fires without messing up electronics).