Blogging Roller

I'm attending the Triangle Software Symposium this weekend. So far it has been great. I went to David Geary's talk on JSF, Stuart Halloway's talk on Meta-programming and Bruce Tate's talk on Spring. Geary's talk was excellent, but I probably should have atteneded a different talk because it was essentially the same talk he gave to the Tri-JUG a couple of months ago. Halloway's talk was thought provoking and fun. Tate's presentation was good, but the subject matter was less than impressive. He told us that we would be blown away, but at the end, a show of hands proved that few people were even intrigued by Spring.

Today I'm going to focus on UI, as I have been doing in my day job. I'm going to attend David Geary's advanced JSF talk and Ben Galbraith's talks on SWT/JFace and "How to make Swing sing."

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).