Released IA

I released IraqiAlert, or at least put it up on the site. I’m debating whether to try to a fark ad (“Going to Iraqi to help out Saddam? Make sure you know what area’s he’ll most appreciate you protecting!”). It would be nice to get hit a bit, I’m just sure getting fark’ed is the way to go :P

Tomorrow I’m going to take IraqiAlert, comment it, and then take that source and create a generic alert app. Basically get any group the user can access, and let them select which they are monitoring (more than one maybe?). That should be really quick, as IraqiAlert is doing 99% of what it needs to do, just needs to be more generic. Oh, and login I guess 

Then the next will be the “Enter” app, which will allow the user to enter applications. Then the PocketPC stuff. Hehe, just a bit more to go.

I did a bit of a load test tonight. Ran WebWacker against the domain, getting the Iraqi group list (all the locs, ~25K a pop). Ran it for 10 minutes, 5 wackers. It was able to hit it 5265 times (11 a second). I was also using the site, trying to do various things, while that was going on, and I couldn’t tell the difference (e.g., that (smallish) load wasn’t noticeable). I’m going to keep trying various things over the next week, to try to get a feel for what it can take. I was happy to see it didn’t hurt it much, under that load (way to go Active Host!).

I did notice some spikes. On just the AE Service, the base-line for running that transation is 16 milliseconds (that’s from the time the request first comes in to just before the response time is sent. Includes all DB access, login, access validation, XML creation). I see one instance where it took 1150 milli’s, and a handful at 250-400. That’s cutting out any kind of network latency, so it’s probably either the web server being busy or the database (as in… busy doing something other than AE). While Active Host will be able to handle the site for a while, if it takes off at all I’m either going to have to host myself (which I prefer) or get a (at least) better semi-dedicated server. The problem is, of course, I don’t have control over the equipment, so tracking problems is going to be tough.



Oh, and I also added “system” name to everything. Was a real pain in the ass, but I can see that as more software gets written, I’m going to want it (to tell where requests are coming from).