Yes! Yes! Yes!

Oh, happiness! Oh, rapture! Oh, angels in the air with bells! Oh, Pilgrims, you got nothing on me today!

Oh, we got a good one coming! It took serious effort and we had no idea if it would work. All the other efforts didn't. But it does, it does—it DOES!

I just made a hundred smiley faces on Chris's chat session!

Give us a few days to nail it down, and spread it out to all users.

Not gonna say what it is. Would spoil the fun.

It's NOT collections. Just to clear that up ahead of time.

It IS performance related.
It IS a cool technique.
It IS geeky and 99% of you won't care about the details.
Those same 99% are CERTAINLY going to be happy about the results. :)

he hints at collections, but implying something else... his cruelty has no bounds...

I want to tattoo the details on my bicep!

Note, not 99% will care. Fewer, but some of our best users.

But he's happy...

I just want to see a video of the dancing. Or of the tattoo.

he is happy~

I am wondering who is on the list of best users ....?

6 > I'd like to see the video of the tatooing ;)

7 > I wonder what criteria are used in determining that?

I wonder how such a sweet face can hide such an evil heart.

Not gonna say what it is. Would spoil the fun.

Meanie.

#7 my first thought too.

But tim certainly seems pleased about something. Maybe he's finally managed to turn off the googlebots stealing the bandwidth. Or invented a new database searching algorythem that works. Or author touchstones? Or sort by alpha author ?

> Or sort by alpha author

The technology hasn't been invented yet...

I like seeing him happy. I am so grateful for LT! If it makes him happy

I think he finally understood how pressing enter affects autosubmit in search boxes:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/29743

With any luck, it's the mind reading feature we've been waiting for so long.

Tease.

mind reading feature? no kidding...

cool!

>6 ablachly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfPg5LjGYz8

>15 MerryMary: I'm kinda hoping for the "tracking your borrowed books by satellite and smiting the malefactors with a death-ray" feature mentioned on http://www.librarything.com/privacy - that would be cool! If it's the mind reading, I hope it's optional.

LOL I am simply overjoyed to see Tim so happy! Totally worth the not-knowing, here.

Whatever it is, you definitely have my interest now.

According to Tim's wife, Lisa, he was was looking for someone to dance with to celebrate... guess I took lunch at JUST the right time. -Mike

I was a bit concerned that Tim was by himself when he posted that. Just doesn't seem right.

I'd say he was beside himself!

Whatever it is, maseltov!

:-)

>Or sort by alpha author ?

Is that anything like "alpha male"? (I wonder who the most "alpha" author out there is . . . ;) )

23:Hemingway naturally.:)

I bet we're getting more cowbell. =)

Tim worked out how to put his pants back on?

I dunno, that first message sounds more like he's still wearing them on his head.

.... I'm sorry, but the image of nailing something down after removing pants & dancing around....

it has me very worried, scared & ... truly concerned...

100 smiley faces???

Tim, I'm glad that you are very happy...

but I'm really concerned about you!!

;)

Native iPhone/touch app?

Ooo, I like excitement! Now my curiosity is piqued!

Tim wrote: Give us a few days to nail it down, and spread it out to all users.

It's been a few days...are you almost ready to spread it out, or at least to tell us what it is?

;-)

I've got a hammer - can I help?

Yeah, we're still working on it, but I have to say that much of the effect dissipated when tens of thousands of users started hammering at the site. I went to elation to despair and now I'm back to cautious optimism...

Just think how much worse it would be if you hadn't done whatever-it-is!

Ohhhhhh I know! Affinities are coming back! :D

*crickets*

What?

I pine for Affinity.

Oh, please let it be affinity coming back. Or better touchstones!

Hm, but if only the better users will be pleased. Better data? Better combining options? Adding books to your catalog directly from someone else's catalog? Better searching?

Oi oi, guessing is so much fun...

I don't really miss affinity in Talk, but review sorting by affinity would make my week.

Oooh, as would a multi-separate/"explode this work" function, instead of separating mis-combined things one at a time.

Somehow I doubt it's any of these.

lol I bet Tim is just loving this, everyone throwing out guesses that are probably nowhere near what it really is. Eeeeeevil Tim! hehe

I can't even make a guess, I have no clue. I just can't wait to actually find out!

It's a twenty ton weight that falls on spamers*G*

An LT Scratch-N-Sniff component?

>41 Carnophile:

Nooooo... as an anosmic, that would just be too cruel to bear!! :P

I suppose that Tim won't mind me telling people what we were talking about.

Basically we are breaking up the book database into multiple "shards". This is called "sharding" (we IT folks are really creative in our naming). We didn't invent it or anything but we are happy that it turned out to be easier to do than we had previously thought. It also gave us an immediate performance boost.

Unfortunately that performance boost didn't last when we scaled out the sharding. We believe this is mostly due to the fact that we're currently hardware I/O-bound. We're ordering new hardware so that should be alleviated (to a point) and we can attack the sharding idea again. It's a busy few of days here with lots of stuff on the horizon.

Yeah, basically I got a 10x speed increase when I sharded, but the input/output is so overdone now that, when we rolled it out, it wasn't faster. We're at about 100% for reads right now—so that 100% of the time a request waits in line. The sharding cut down somewhat on the worst requests—it's slightly slower for the fastest reads, and slightly faster for the slowest—but most weren't affected.

As you can imagine, I was out of my mind with joy when our tests came back with 10x speed. But, even if it's not now faster, doing all the work to shard the data put us in a much better position to exploit things once we acquired enough machines to do it for real.

The really good news is (1) We are currently ordering* two primary database servers, each of them better than the two we have now. So, we're doubling our resources; (2) We are a day or two away from something that will allow us to turn this minor spree into a buying orgy.

*We ordered, and our bank—the fuckers—decided that, although we have the money, the order was suspiciously large. We are reordering today.

We are a day or two away from something that will allow us to turn this minor spree into a buying orgy.

LT goes public and kicks out a big fat stock offering!

Edit: Pretty bold, to refer to your bank the way you did! Or maybe as someone good with code, you've explained to them how "unfortunate" it would be if something bad happened to their ability to participate in electronic trading systems.

Yeah, TD Banknorth can take the criticism.

"I'd hate for somethin' bad should happen to your mainframe."

"TD Banknorth's server sleeps with the fishes"

Ilove understatement

I think some of the Danish banks would have benefitted from a lack of "ability to participate in electronic trading systems."

Well, we did it. After our efforts to make the site faster by software alone, we went ahead and bought two honking servers.

Both are slightly better (faster processor, more memory, faster disks) than our two workhose db servers, Mongo and Plato. They should arrive next week. My guess is that we install them over next weekend. It's going to take a downtime, unfortunately. When we come up, with luck, we'll be a good deal faster...

Can we name the two new ones Phobos and Deimos?

Yayy!

Yeah. *I* am going to name these two. The current servers were all named by someone who knew I was a Classics guy, but didn't know much about the Gods. So, Apollo and Athena are twins. WTF? Apollo and Artemis are twins.

Mongo, of course, was the nickname for the server to supplant Plato. It's too bad there's no famous Greek philosopher named Mongo.

I'm thinking we do some historical ones—Alexander and Hannibal, for example.

I predict it won't go well, and we'll be overrun with "rampaging elephant" errors.

Pessimist.

>55 PaulFoley: Nice one!

No love for the Mongols, eh?

How about naming one of them Borges?

The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself).

- The Library of Babel

Hey, I named the last one and stuck to your theme just *fine*, thanks ;)

Around the corner and down the street lives Plato's Dental Lab.

(I wish I went around taking pictures, because I missed great old neon on the Scirocco Club. It went through a couple of name changes, perhaps because of the unsolved drive-by.

The neighborhood is somewhat English-challenged, so there's a little cafe called Sicily Aisle. We used to have Cheap Cigarettes and Cheaper Then Cheap Cigarettes.)

Alexander and Hannibal don't really connect for me. What about Ptolemy and Cleopatra, or Antony and Cleopatra, or Remus and Romulus, or Scipio (Africanus) and Hannibal, or .... I could go on. And on. And on....

LOL @ 55

Right Hand and Left Hand, on the assumption that they're going to be synchronised so that the ...

Mongo only pawn... in game of life.

Blazing Saddles...Now, that's a great movie!

I'd do Eumenes and Lysimachus, or Lysimachus and Antigonus.

Have a draw and name them after two random members (not only is it nice for someone to know they have a server named after them - well, in my slightly geeky world anyway - but also we can blame them for any outages ...) ;))

>65 klarusu:
Include me out of that idea.

When my house gets a power twitch (often enough in country Victoria, Australia) and my home server (BagEnd) goes to the UPS, I get a text message on my phone and an e-mail in my inbox. Normally it is just a flicker and I get a "power restored" text & email. Sometimes it lasts for a while and I get "count-down to power off" texts & emails.

I can handle that, but if I get blamed by every LT member for any LT server downtime, my inbox would explode and my phone would melt and take my leg off. I'll pass on the honour, thanks anyway.

eta: Not that I'm saying there's a lot of web site down time, but there must be server downtime that not everybody notices?

When my house gets a power twitch (often enough in country Victoria, Australia) and my home server (BagEnd) goes to the UPS, I get a text message on my phone and an e-mail in my inbox. Normally it is just a flicker and I get a "power restored" text & email. Sometimes it lasts for a while and I get "count-down to power off" texts & emails.

I can empathise with that! I'm the back-up on email and text for the alarms on the freezers and incubators in the labs at Uni and many a Saturday night has been spent opening endless text messages saying 'power down' ... 'and up again' ... 'and down again' ... 'and up again'.

(Don't worry justjim, tongue was firmly in cheek on #65)

#65 Not that I'm saying there's a lot of web site down time, but there must be server downtime that not everybody notices?

Yeah. I've started using an external monitoring service, you can see some reports here. Uptime over the past three months has been 99.86%, which probably sounds great to anyone who isn't in IT. ;)

That's not a complete picture though - for example there can sometimes be partial outages where some part of the site may become unresponsive while everything else is ok. These stats are only tracking the website as a whole, so it'll take a site-wide outage before it shows up here.

Of course, that's also only tracking www.librarything.com - it's possible for that to be down while some other subdomains are still up.

We have two new DB servers on the way, which will help a lot with stability and speed, but they're really only the first step in fixing things.

The great news is that we'll be carrying out some major infrastructure upgrades soon, which should see those numbers improve dramatically in.. let's say Q1 2009 ;) (I hope to be ordering equipment before Christmas, but there are always unexpected delays (such as two new DB servers due to arrive at the colo on Christmas eve, followed by their disk arrays a week later) and there's a lot of work to be done.)

#68

Oh, I don't know 99.86% uptime is only about 12 hour 15 minutes downtime a year. Doesn't sound too bad (especially if it happens when I am asleep most of the time).

Of course you are probably only counting unscheduled downtime and as you say there are other little problems which affect user-perception as well.

Generally I much prefer targets which say no more than X unscheduled downtime events of no more than Y minutes each than the over-hyped five nines uptime guarantee you see bandied about.

Don't call them after two people who were somehow implicated in each other's death. They might not work well together.