Friday, 11th September 2009
Announcing Heechee. “Heechee is a transparent mercurial-as-subversion gateway”—you can use it to allow subversion clients to check out a mercurial repository, meaning svn:externals can work against projects hosted by mercurial. It’s very young code but I’ve already seen it out-perform regular subversion for checkout speed.
We experimented with different async DB approaches, but settled on synchronous at FriendFeed because generally if our DB queries were backlogging our requests, our backends couldn't scale to the load anyway. Things that were slow enough were abstracted to separate backend services which we fetched asynchronously via the async HTTP module.