Looks like Booko’s been mentioned out there on the Tubez today resulting in a 10x increase in my previous maximum visitors. Oz Bargain Blog and Lifehacker are today’s top two referrers – Hello Guys! Sorry for the slowness – I’m doing my best to get things sorted out. For those of you of a graphical nature, here’s a visual representation of the traffic for Booko.
Awesome!
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.
Sorry everybody! Booko got overwhelmed there for a bit. I’ve made some changes and we should be good for a while now.
Shop #21 has been added – Emporium Books. Pricing looks pretty good – should be a good addition.
Now I can finally say “Check over 20 online book shops!” 🙂
Booko’s got some shiny new hosting! I’ve moved to a new Slicehost host doing nothing but serving up Booko pages. I’ve decided to try Ubuntu for hosting this time, moving from my much loved Gentoo, just for something different. I’m more familiar with Debian, but Ubuntu is very similar and I feel like something new. I’ve not done any performance testing, but it certainly feels snappier. 😉
Booko’s DNS has also been moved to Slicehost’s DNS hosting. Just to get everything in one place.
The blog will stay on the old host, shrunk down a bit now that it’s doing less work. Also, I’ve now added Online Bargain Megastore.
Booko now calculates the savings you’ll make between the price of the cheapest store, and the most expensive store, including the percentage saved. Plus, I’ve setup affiliate links for Better World Books – not that that’s a feature as such, but it should hopefully help me pay for hosting Booko.
I’ve also discovered a couple of bugs with Booko which need fixin’, one online shop changed their site meaning I need to fix the price scraper, plus I upgraded my Ruby install without fully testing it. The ActiveRecord component of Ruby on Rails introduced database connection pooling – which is great but the default values were too small for Booko. Some of you may have discovered only half the prices being downloaded for books – sorry about that.
Thanks to Andrew from Online Bargain Megastore, I’ll hopefully be adding http://oo.com.au/ to Booko sometime soon, bringing the total number of stores checked to 19.
I’ve added another shop to Booko – the Book Abyss, bringing the total number of online stores checked to 18.
I also started adding the Online Bargain Megastore, but the calculation of shipping requires delivery postcodes and, apparently, a per kilo surcharge. They sell more than just books, so this makes sense, but I don’t think it’s possible for Booko to figure that out unfortunately.
OK – Searching All sites now should be faster, they’re now searched concurrently. Threading FTW.
The most confusing aspect of Booko for new users is having to choose between the various search engines (The Amazons, The Nile or Fishpond) to find their book. Users often think they need to search on all the sites manually to get prices for their books, when actually, the search segment is literally, just to find the book – the price comparison is the second step.
Well, Booko should now be much easier to use (hopefully). I’ve added an “All” search option as the default search method. Searching “All” will search all four of the sites listed and aggregate the results.