pbwikinathan

PBwiki is now a billion times faster!

OK, not a billion times, but more like 6 times faster than we were a month ago. When we first started out, PBwiki was super-fast because there wasn’t much going on. As we’ve grown two things have happened – first, we’ve added lots of useful features and second, we now have lots more traffic allContinue reading “PBwiki is now a billion times faster!”

Whither pagers?

Earlier this week we had a service outage. The proper chain of events would be: 00:00:00 Server problem 00:00:03 Monitor processes notice problem, send page to admin’s phone 00:00:10 Phone rings with new message 00:00:30 Admin logs in to server, fixes problem 00:01:00 Problem resolved But what happened was: 00:00:00 Server problem 00:00:03 Monitor processesContinue reading “Whither pagers?”

Browser trends

We aggregate all kinds of usage data so help us make better decisions about how to improve PBwiki. Here are a few graphs I found interesting as a web geek, enjoy. Firefox Internet Explorer Browser family

Hot and heavy – rackmount servers and thermal management

We’ve been bringing up a number of new servers at the San Francisco data center. We’ve got some great Core2Duo machines which draw between 0.75A and 1.10A but have pretty substantial horsepower. So far so good, and almost all of the machines went in happy and stayed that way. An interesting aspect of hosting serversContinue reading “Hot and heavy – rackmount servers and thermal management”

PDF export improvements coming along

Lots of people have requested an enhanced PDF export capability — our new team member Igor has been doing some great work adding features to this little gem of a feature. Top priorities for us are: 1) proper unicode support (for all those wacky citizens of the world) 2) proper handling of lists, especially nestedContinue reading “PDF export improvements coming along”

PHP OO pitfalls

I should have picked up on this earlier, but PHP does some crazy stuff with objects. Because they’re not objects. Take the following: function _init_storage($options) { if(!$se = $options[‘storage_engine’]) { trigger_error(“Error instantiating MetaStash – no storage_engine” ); } $this->engine = $se; } That looks fine, we’ve got some options defined at our constructor and it’sContinue reading “PHP OO pitfalls”

Under the hood

What makes PBwiki tick? For stability: – Debian Sarge Linux – rock solid with very good package management – grsecurity – paranoid security, the small overhead is worth the peace of mind – MySQL – just works – Apache – a known quantity For speed: – PHP – it’s fast and dead simple – memcachedContinue reading “Under the hood”

PBwiki loves Core2Duo

We’re working behind-the-scenes to seriously ramp up our server fleet. When David started PBwiki the core servers were a bunch of 2001-vintage VA Linux boxes from Craigslist — Essentially “San Carlos: 400 pounds of 2U servers $10 OBO, you pick them up tonight”. Since those heady days of off-brand ramen and Mountain Dew we’ve accumulatedContinue reading “PBwiki loves Core2Duo”

A busy week for PBwiki

We’ve just started to settle in at our new offices in San Bruno. This is a big step up for our little company! It’s been as much as a year of work-from-home and squatting at local cafes for the team. We also welcome Emily, our great new admin. In addition, here we are posting toContinue reading “A busy week for PBwiki”