This is going to be a really short post, but for someone it could save an hour of life.
So, you’ve nothing to do and you’ve decided to play around with IPv6 or maybe you’re happened to be an administrator of a web service that needs to support IPv6 connectivity and you need to make your nginx server work nicely with this protocol.
First thing you need to do is to enable IPv6 in nginx by recompiling it with --with-ipv6 configure option and reinstalling it. If you use some pre-built package, check if your nginx already has this key enabled by running nginx -V.
Read the rest of this entry →
It’s been a while since I’ve posted my first post about the way we do document pages caching in Scribd and this approach has definitely proven to be really effective since then. In the second post of this series I’d like to explain how we handle our complex document URLs and logged in users in the caching architecture.
First of all, let’s take a look at a typical Scribd’s document URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/1/Improved-Statistical-Test.
As we can see, it consists of a document-specific part (/doc/1) and a non-unique human-readable slug part (/Improved-Statistical-Test). When a user comes to the site with a wrong slug in the document URL, we need to make sure we send the user to the correct URL with a permanent HTTP 301 redirect. So, obviously we can’t simply send our requests to the squid because it’d cause few problems:
- When we change document’s title, we’d create a new cached item and would not be able to redirect users from the old URL to the new one
- When we change a title, we’d pollute cache with additional document page copies.
One more problem that makes the situation even worse – we have 3 different kinds of users on the site:
- Logged in users – active web site users that are logged in and should see their name at the top of the page, should see all kinds of customized parts of the page, etc (especially when a page is their own document).
- Anonymous users – all users that are not logged in and visit the site with a flash-enabled browser
- Bots – all kinds of crawlers that can’t read flash content and need to see a plain text document version
All three kinds of users should see their own document page versions whether the page is cached or not.
Read the rest of this entry →
It’s been a few months since we‘ve started actively using ActiveMQ queue server in our project. For some time we had pretty weird problems with it and even started thinking about switching to something else or even writing our own queue server which would comply with our requirements. The most annoying problem was the following: some time after activemq restart everything worked really well and then activemq started lagging, queue started growing and all producer processes were stalling on push() operations. We rewrote our producers from Ruby to JRuby, then to Java and still – after some time everything was in a bad shape until we restarted the queue server.
Read the rest of this entry →
Month ago I was on a vacation and as usual even though our hotel provided us with an internet connection on a pretty decent speeds, I wasn’t able to work there because they’ve banned all tcp ports but some major ones (like 80, 21, etc) and I needed to be able to use ssh, mysql, IMs and other non-web software.
After a short research I’ve found a pretty simple to set up and easy to use approach to such a connection problems I’d like to describe here.
Read the rest of this entry →