Blogging Roller

Cameron Purdy commented on FreeRoller performance recently:

Apparently, over half the load is on the RSS/XML side (not the "interactive web/HTML" side,) and it's enough to completely saturate their T1 connection. Wow! And it's running on an eMachine (a US$200 "Walmart computer") that was given up after it had served its useful life. So in a way, it's amazing that it runs at all. However, Anthony has plans to cluster it, and with a couple of commodity servers to run on (plus enough bandwidth?), it should be back flying again, hopefully before too long.

Recently, I've been helping Anthony Eden keep FreeRoller up and I've been watching the logs and the stats. Cameron is right, FreeRoller gets a hell of a lot of RSS traffic and FreeRoller is running on a pretty light-weight machine: a 450Mhz Pentium II with 256MB RAM.  This might be a fine an Apache/mod_perl app, but for big beefy Roller/Tomcat/Struts/Velocity/Castor it's just not enough.

Still, I'm doing what I can to improve performance. For example: this weekend I added caching to FreeRoller's RSS feed. To do this I had to add: 1) handling for the IF-MODIFIED-SINCE header in the PageCache ServletFilter and 2) a new Filter Mapping to map '/rss/*' to Roller's OSCache based PageCache Servlet Filter. This should speed average RSS response time, reduce memory usage, and database access. It may have some effect on the FreeRoller RSS feeds, so if you notice a problem in a FreeRoller RSS feed let me know about it.