Reflector

Today I started working on a 'content acceleration platform' [sic], which will really help us ( if things go as planned ) with our ever increasing bandwidth saturation problems we are facing here at Phaistos Networks.

The main idea is that we are going to deploy as many content acceleration points on various hosting providers around the world, use a UltraDNS or a similar service so that whenever a user requests an object (HTTP request) from, say, images.pathfinder.gr, it will resolve to the CAP ( content acceleration point ) which is closer to the user's location. The Reflector node running on that CAP will serve the object directly (if cached either in-mem or on-disk) or will issue a redirection to the originator (say, orig.img.pathfinder.gr ) for that path and fetch it in the mean time, so that future requests for that object will be satisfied from the cache.

It's a more or less trivial application to build. Throw a few threads here, get them to handle some hundred concurrent connections through I/O multiplexing, manage some containers here, some events there.. However, according to my calculations, each CAP will be able to support over 2,000,000 objects in-mem and at least 10,000,000 on-disk. I doubt we will ever need that much of a capacity, but it's nice to be able to grow effortlessly.

I wish we could just afford to get more bandwidth and save our time for developing new services or fixing old ones, but it is too damn expensive here in Greece. Oh, btw, using Squid for this kind of operation is a no-no. Whoever wrote Squid didn't care at all about optimizations, ease of use or scalability, it seems..

Wednesday, 21 June 2006 9:22 pm

Decompression, failed

For the past few weeks we (Phaistos Networks people) were in a 'work till you drop' mode, because of problems that kept on materializing out of nowhere and new stuff that we had to release on time.

I try to play hide and seek with murphy's law tonight, but eventually I was busted. Before I had to get back to taming the beasts, I did get to spend some 30 mins listening to podcasts and watching vidcasts from my bed, using the FrontRow remote. It's a great way to relax, to lie down and listen to interesting stuff. Alas, one cannot enjoy a moment of peace for more than that. More than a moment.

Thursday, 15 June 2006 1:06 am

I am way too tired

This past week has been crazy, completely crazy. It is as if some sort of curse was placed on our account - - problems hiting us from every possible direction. This, in turn, led to problems, frustration, VERY long days and nights, neglect for our loved ones, to name a few.

The new Pathfinder Blogs, which is under BETA and has quite ome way to go to reach the kind of status we want, is getting better by the day, and night. I am pretty sure it will be ten times better in a week's time.

I need a rest.

Friday, 9 June 2006 2:10 am