EventMachine, How Does It Work?

At this year’s Scottish Ruby Conference, I gave a talk about EventMachine, slides are available. Amidst the hype around Node.js it’s too easy to forget that Ruby has had evented I/O libraries for years. EventMachine, libebb, rev, cool.io, to name a few. As a general introduction I recommend reading Dan Kegel’s article on the C10K problem, the problem of handling 10000 server connections on a single machine. It introduces all the evented approaches that have been implemented in the different operating systems over the last some 15 years.

MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8

Last weekend I tweeted two links to two tweets by a poor guy who apparently got his MongoDB database into an unrecoverable state during shutdown whilst upgrading to a newer version. That tweet quickly made the rounds, and the next morning I saw myself staring at replies stating that it was all his fault, because he 1.) used kill -9 to shut it down because apparently the process hung (my guess is it was in the middle of flushing all data to disk) and 2.) didn’t have a slave, just one database instance.

The Virtues of Monitoring

Over the last year I haven’t only grown very fond of coffee, but also of infrastructure. Working on Scalarium has been a fun ride so far, for all kinds of reasons, one of them is dealing so much with infrastructure. Being an infrastructure platform provider, what can you do, right?

Why Riak Search Matters…

The awesome dudes at Basho released Riak 0.13 and with it their first version of Riak Search yesterday. This is all kinds of exciting, and I’ll tell you why. Riak Search is (way down below) based on Lucene, both the library and the query interface. It mimicks the Solr web API for querying and indexing. Just like you’d expect something coming out of Basho, you can add and remove nodes at any time, scaling up and down as you go. I’ve seen an introduction on the basics back at Berlin Buzzwords, and it was already shaping up to be nothing but impressive. But enough with all the praise, why’s this stuff exciting?