Blogging Roller

Monday morning traffic has proven that the JRoller performance troubles are not quite over yet. That slow query I mentioned earlier was not the only problem with Roller 0.9.9. We have been experiencing heavy load and have had to restart multiple times.

Update: we're working with Kirk Pepperdine of JavaPerformanceTuning.com to zero in on what looks like a very bad memory leak.

Tonight I was finally able to get UTF-8 support going with Roller and MySQL. It was relatively easy for me to do this because of the hard work of new Roller team member Jaap van der Molen. Thanks Jaap! Also, working with a local copy of the JRoller database, I figured out how to convert the database to UTF-8. I used mysqldump to dump the database to a text file, edited the table definitions, and then "sourced" it back into the database. I'm not sure that this is the best approach, but it works. Here is a screenshot to prove it:

<img src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/jroller-i18n.png" title="JRoller screenshot showing I18N" />

I believe that we have finally stabilized JRoller. In case you didn't know, JRoller has been "on the fritz" for the two weeks since I deployed the latest version of Roller (0.9.9 -> 1.0) there. The root problem appears to have been a horrible query that would examine and sort 1.8 million rows and drag down MySQL for over 5 minutes. The query would only occur on one weblog and the use case that caused the query would not cause the query on other weblogs. I stress tested Roller on my homebox before deploying to JRoller, as I always do, but I don't have the test setup to simulate the JRoller load and I certainly would not have found this bug because it affects only one weblog and in only one use case.

Personally speaking, the bug caused me a lot of stress. My three children now hate me and think I am a barking monster, my wife is worried that I am going to snap, and I can't shake the desire to constantly check JRoller to see if it is up. It makes me wonder why I on earth ever volunteered to keep JRoller running after Anthony Eden walked away. Support from the Javalobby, Rick Ross and Matthew Schmidt, are what kept me going through this little nightmare.

On the positive side of things, the bug cause me to take a good hard look at the Roller queries and caching once again. I made a hell of a lot of fixes, optimizations, and improvements. Roller is probably running better than it ever has before and is putting only a tiny load on the Javalobby server. We still have some queries that run too slow, and I have some bugs to fix, but I think we are out of the fire (fingers crossed).

Roller's JIRA issue tracker is somewhat broken at the moment, so we are tracking issues to Fix-For Roller 1.0 on the Roller Wiki. This list is mainly for the use of the Roller developers. Please continue to report Roller bugs to Roller's JIRA issue tracker and Roller developers will promote as many of the the worthy ones to the Fix-For list as time permits.

With a couple of tweaks to Roller's HibernateStrategy, I've gotten Roller to work again with the tiny pure-Java database HSQLDB.

The other day, I added the notion of "pinned" weblog entries to Roller. This new feature makes it easier for Roller admins to communicate with other bloggers on a Roller site by allowing admin users to "pin" their own weblog entries to the top of the main Roller page. You can see the new feature in action on the JRoller main page.

Wiki syntax seems to be working just fine in Roller 0.9.9 as demonstrated by this fine quality Wiki-Blog post.

I'm not sure why your _entry page template is not working, Matt. Perhaps one of the macros you are using has a different call signature than it did in 0.9.8?

The good news is that, with Lance's improvements to the plugin pipeline, you no longer need that _entry page template to enable Wiki syntax. If you have the Wiki plugin listed in your web.xml and you have the Wiki Syntax checkbox checked on your Website:Settings page then you will see a Wiki Syntax checkbox in the Weblog Edit page. You can enable Wiki Syntax on a per Weblog entry basis by setting that checkbox.

By the way, Wiki support is not enabled on JRoller.com because there is no Wiki on JRoller.com.

I have successfully upgraded JRoller.com to Roller 0.9.9. If you encounter any problems please report a issue on Roller's JIRA issue tracker located here: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller.

• For all users: Roller now supports locale and timezone settings for each user. You can set your locale and timezone on the Website->User page of the Editor UI.
  
  
• For users (excluding Hani) who have customized page templates: if you added a call to $pageModel.getRecentWeblogEntries() in your weblog templates, you will need to add a second argument to the call. In Roller 0.9.8 the method took only one argument, an integer being the number of entries to return. In Roller 0.9.9, the method takes a second parameter, a string being the category of posts to be displayed. Pass in "/" to include all categories. For example: $pageModel.getRecentWeblogEntries(15,"/") would get up to 15 recent entries in all categories.

I worked out the problems with the database upgrade scripts and code. I'll be upgrading JRoller in the next hour or two.

UPDATE: upgrade is underway.

I think Roller 0.9.9 is ready for prime-time and I plan on deploying it to JRoller this weekend. I spent the last couple of nights testing the upgrade process using a very recent copy of the JRoller database and I believe that I will have all of the glitches worked out by this evening. I will post an announcement here a couple of hours before I begin the upgrade, which I hope will take less than an hour.

The plan is to upgrade JRoller to 0.9.9, get feedback and bug reports, fix bugs, release 0.9.9.1, get feedback and bug reports, fix bugs, release Roller 0.9.9.2, and then repeat the process until we are ready to declare victory. Once we reach that point, we'll call it Roller 1.0 and release it on SourceForge.

The major new features of Roller 1.0 will be a new Editor UI, hierarchical categories, hierarchical bookmark/blogroll folders with OPML import/export, Atom API support, Atom newsfeed support, a new look-and-feel in the Web interface, lots of other features, and numerous bug fixes. Some of these features may be disabled in the Roller 0.9.9 cut that I will deploy this weekend.

A number of folks have been taking a closer look at Roller and making note of the various problems and shortcomings that they encounter. Henri Yandell put together a list of Roller Grumbles, Michael Koziarski posted some notes on evaluating Roller, and, as a result of new feature discussions on the Roller-Dev mailing list there is now a Roller Wish List on the Roller Wiki. Drop by the mailing-list or the Wiki and make your voice heard.

Henri Yandell has written a Movable Type to Roller migration script.

Nerd news site Slashdot caught wind of the JBoss Group's slimey business tactics, linked to three weblogs on JRoller, and proved that Roller can survive the Slashdot effect. This says a lot about Roller and the technology stack that supports Roller including Tomcat, Struts, Velocity, Hibernate, and especially OSCache. Via Rick Ross.

Lance Lavandowska: Roller needs more "community" to get where it is going.

Please welcome Jaap van der Molen to the Roller project. Jaap not only took the time to create a complete Dutch translation of Roller, but he also took it upon himself to finish up the internationalization job that Lance and I started - by internationalizing our Velocity macros, introducing a locale-switcher Servlet, and addressing lots of other details. Thanks Jaap! Jaap has a lot of other cool ideas for Roller so we are happy to welcome him to the project.

Two Wiki spammers have been trying for over a week to sneak links into the Roller Wiki. I subscribe to the Wiki's Recent Changes newsfeed, so I am able to catch them everytime, but I am getting a little tired of doing this. One Wiki spammer has the IP address 222.64.23.78 and is advertising the site http://www.newline.sh.cn. The other Wiki spammer has the IP address 61.149.181.4 and is advertising http://www.99986.com. I would hate to have to set usernames and passwords for the Wiki again, but these dirtbags may force me to do it.

http://blogs.sun.com is powered by Roller!

I'm amazed, surprised, and very pleased. I'd like to ensure that Roller is a success at Sun, so, Sun bloggers please let me know how I can help.

JRoller has been on acting up recently as several people have noticed. We are looking into the problem(s). We started to notice some flaky behavior last week and system loads were somewhat higher than usual. Some of the additional load was due to a second Tomcat server running some other software. I noticed a lot of suspicious JK2 errors in the Tomcat log files, but that was probably a red herring. After spending some time trying to get the JK2 setup right and upgrading from Tomcat 5.0.18 to Tomcat 5.0.19, I talked to Rick and Matt about taking JK2 and HTTPD out of the picture entirely and that is what we did. We're not getting any more JK2 errors, but we are still experiencing technical difficulties. I'll keep you posted as I try to track down the source of the problem.

That is a nice looking Roller theme.

After months of relatively trouble free operation, JRoller is straining against the load of 3980 users and heavy traffic. I adjusted some of JRoller's mod_jk2 settings today and restarted the server. It failed to start, so I reversed my settings change and tried again - still no luck. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to touch the system until tonight, after I get off work, take the kids to soccer practice, and to the end-of-season dinner. Sorry JRollers, I'm a soccer dad first and a JRoller admin second. Matt Schmidt may be able to do something after he gets out of class this afternoon.

Update - 11:30PM EST - JRoller is back up. JRoller's JIRA instance should be up shortly.