Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged http in Sep, 2009

Filters: Year: 2009 × Month: Sep × http × Sorted by date

cloud-crowd. New parallel processing worker/job queue system with a strikingly elegant architecture. The central server is an HTTP server that manages job requests, which are farmed out to a number of node HTTP servers which fork off worker processes to do the work. All communication is webhook-style JSON, and the servers are implemented in Sinatra and Thin using a tiny amount of code. The web-based monitoring interface is simply beautiful, using canvas to display graphs showing the system’s overall activity.

# 21st September 2009, 11:09 pm / canvas, cloudcrowd, http, json, message-queues, ruby, sinatra, thin, webhooks, workers

PostBin. Handy debugging tool for webhooks—create a TinyURL-style URL, then see a log of any POST requests made to that address.

# 21st September 2009, 11:03 pm / http, post, postbin, webhooks

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.

Bret Taylor

# 11th September 2009, 5:31 pm / async, brettaylor, friendfeed, http, tornado