What a Day

Booko is on track to have received 10x the traffic it received on its busiest day ever. In an hour today it received more traffic than the busiest day previously in total. Several bugs have been found and squashed – naïve approaches to problems have been refined. Problems still remain however which I’m working on.

The biggest problem I’m having is the decreasing responsiveness and increasing memory usage of the application. Twice today the host rebooted due to lack of memory. Naturally I suspect a memory leak somewhere, but I’ve had very little success finding any problems. Of particular interest however is some weird strace output – lots and lots of this:

rt_sigreturn(0) = 4
--- SIGVTALRM (Virtual timer expired) @ 0 (0) ---

Some Google work leads me to think this may be thread related – there were reports of decreasing responsiveness, so I’ve removed threading support for the one place it’s used in the Rails app – the search field. Search will now be quite a bit slower, but hopefully, everything will continue to work.