Noodlings

This past month I’ve finally gotten some time focus on development and it’s paid off. Hazel 2.2 beta is out. Go to the forums (signup required) for details on how to get it.

The big feature is pattern based matching and substitution. It’s regular expressions for regular people. I still consider it somewhat of a power-user feature but I think I’ve managed to make it accessible to non-programmers. I know some of the programmer-types out there wanted regexes but, really, life is too short for people to have to decipher something like ^(.*)\(\p{N}+\)\.(?:\p{L}|\p{N})+$.

Other features include being able to edit/include AppleScripts and shell scripts inline. This will allow for self-contained rule sets that you can distribute. More date matching operators especially geared towards GTD-like workflows. A couple other more subtle things here and there.

But most of all, this is a momentous occasion because I have finally done it. I have fixed bug #1 in my bug database. Entered almost two years ago, it kept getting carried over to each release’s bug list time and time again. What is bug #1, you may ask? Why, it’s none other than “multiple selection in the rule list”. It’s been one of those rarely requested (maybe 2 or 3 people since Hazel’s original release), low-priority bugs that kept getting overlooked. Well, no longer. I went in and fixed it once and for all (hopefully). Now it looks like bug #4 is the next oldest bug, which, at this rate, I should have closed out in a couple years.

So, if you are fine with running unstable pre-release software that then I invite you to kick the tires. All I ask that you keep all details of the beta to the forums or in emails to me.

Some months ago I had arranged to sponsor Daring Fireball for sometime in April. Then a certain promotion came up that overlapped with it. Not being big on overlapping promotions I bumped it until later. Then I bumped it again. Then another bump. Then a jump to the left and a step to the…whoops, wrong card.

But this week, finally, I am sponsoring Daring Fireball’s RSS feed. There’s even a promo coupon. I’m not going to tell you what it is as that would defeat the purpose of the promotion. Subscribe to the feed and look for yourself. If it’s not showing up for you, wait towards the end of the week when it will get posted again.

And on a side note, I suggest hanging around the forums (signup required for the beta forum in particular) as there may be some beta news by the end of the week.

It’s been over a month since I’ve been with Slicehost so I figure it’s enough time to make an assessment. Especially now that the MacUpdate promo is over, I actually have a sense of how well things hold up under load.

For those who don’t know, Slicehost is a hosting provider. What sets them apart from shared hosting providers is that they provide you with what they call a “slice” (other similar providers may call it a virtual private server or VPS). What this is is a virtualized server of your own. From your perspective, it’s like getting a dedicated server. You choose what OS you want (which right now consists of different Linux distributions) and you get root access so you can do whatever you want.

It differs from shared hosting in that your slice is like it’s own machine. It gets a guaranteed amount of memory and CPU so even if your neighbor is a hog, it won’t affect your slice. Because of the way that the Xen virtualization works, it is impossible to oversell on capacity.

Compared to getting a dedicated machine, it’s much cheaper and you aren’t tied to specific hardware. Blown power supply? Not your problem. I don’t know exactly what they do in this case, but I imagine they can move your slice to different hardware as needed.

Set up

You can read my original report on getting set up. You are expected to set up and administer the slice yourself. If you have the inclination and need a high level of control, then this is probably for you.

It only took me a weekend from getting my slice to having everything migrated over. Of course, being the tweaky type that I am, I spent some days playing with it and optimizing it. One of the benefits and dangers of having full control.

Upgrading

When I launched the new store, there was a problem. Ruby on Rails is a memory hog and as a result, I needed to upgrade to a bigger slice. Fortunately, Slicehost automates all that. Just log into the management console and request the larger slice. It takes a little while for the slice to get prepped but during that time your slice is still up. The downtime for the reboot was short (less than a minute) and that was it. The fact that it’s automated is a big deal to me as it means I can do it on the fly without doing a drawn out back and forth with a support person.

Traffic

As you may or may not know, Hazel was included in the recent MacUpdate bundle. Before the launch, I upgraded my slice again to 1024M in anticipation of the load. Turns out, this was unnecessary. The 1024 slice never broke a sweat. The load went up briefly to 0.4 once. Apache connections stayed below the upper limits of what a smaller slice would have been able to handle. Traffic was about 150K requests a day at its peak. I don’t really have a frame of reference for that except that it’s a good bit more than I usually get. In short, the 512 slice would have been able to handle it fine. The slice has performed better than with my previous providers and I haven’t noticed any slowdowns or downtime (except for when I restart things for maintenance). With the promotion over, I’ve downgraded my slice and things are still running smoothly.

After all this, I’ve only contacted support twice. Once in the beginning just to say hi and once today for an issue that ended up being an Ubuntu thing. In both cases, I received responses within the hour. Granted, I’m doing a lot of the things that support at other hosting services would do for you. It’s a trade-off between effort and control and I’m at that point where I need more of the latter. For the things I really care about, keeping the machine and network reliable, there has been nothing to report, and that is how it should be.

It’s too bad most providers price on bandwidth and storage space. I would have happily paid more per month if I could get higher availability and reliability (with the ability to run RoR – sorry Pair). Of course, with everyone claiming 99.999999% availability, it’s hard to differentiate oneself on this front so providers seem to just pile on the bandwidth/space like extra gravy hiding the bad meat.

I feel like VPSes are the future of hosting. The amount of computing power that you can cram into a 1U rack space is far more than most of us need or want to pay for. But virtualize it and divvy it up and you have a great scalable model for doing dedicated hosting. It’s probably greener too but I’ll let the hippies make a determination on that.