Wow, been a while since I last posted anything over here (not that I've been regular at posting somewhere else either). Guess, I've been a running a little out of steam lately when it comes to writing stuff. It's not like I don't have anything to share off-late, it's just that I don't have the energy to blog about it these days - & that pretty much sums up how the life is meandering along all this while. So this post is pretty much a beacon just to let people know that I am still alive!
Anyway, I've been working on couple of "different" stuff off-late. On our ASP.Net website we've be using the built in In-Proc Cache to cache our data-objects and when you have a pretty decent cluster size, you run into data-consistence issue apart from having to figure out how to purge caches which are not scattered all over your web-farm. I've been thinking of getting some centralized caching engine for a while and after giving MS Velocity (or whatever it's called now) & Memcached a trial, I've decided to go with memcached along with the enyim client library. We haven't rolled it out on production yet, but in our Dev environment things actually look quite good - no exceptions, good Cache-hit rates. I'll post the entire experience with memcached and integrating with asp.net in a separate blog.
The other thing that technically, I've been looking into is reverse-proxying our web servers. I compared both Squid & Varnish, and zeroed in on Varnish based on the online material available. We already have Varnish set-up before our solr-slaves (because it's quite easy to configure varnish to do that and you get about 40-50% reduction in response times) on production, and we haven't seen any issues with it. Our Varnish cache-hit rates have been actually quite low ~around 30%, which is something that we need to look at - cause to benefit from a reverse-proxy, you would want to have your cache-hits to be around 60-70% on an average. One drawback with Varnish is the documentation available on VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) but I guess if you are clear about your caching strategy, it's not that hard to write one.
Varnishing solr is actually a piece of cake (as you don't have to worry about anonymous v/s authenticated users, session cookies, persistent cookies etc) but when it comes to Varnishing your public web-servers, things can get quite tricky. I'll post in detail, the experiences & things that I learned while Varnishing our web front-ends in another post. By the way, we've been running Varnish before the IIS on our dev environment and things have been looking quite alright so far.
One last thing on the technical stuff - we've been monitoring the performances of our memcached & varnish using munin - more on this in some other post as usual. I know this is lot of Linux stuff for a .net shop but the fact is - I didn't find any good Windows alternative for the above stuff which was free and proved itself to be quite scalable.
Moving on - as some of you would know, photography has been a hobby & a stress-reliever for me. On the photography front - after quite a bit of contemplation I got myself the Cactus triggers so that I can move my Vivitar 285HV off-camera. Well, so far they have been working like a charm. The first shot that I tried; armed with my new off-camera flash capabilities was freezing the water splash - and after 54 shots in the darkness, I did get on keeper -
I'll post about the setup and how I went about this in another post. The other news on the photography front is that I did manage to sell on of my images on fotolia (no I am not a millionaire yet!).
Lastly, I have started playing the guitar again - it's been so many years since I last strummed so it's like I am learning anew!
Well, that pretty much sums up what I've been up to all this while, hopefully, I'll be a little bit more frequent with my posting habits.
Anyway, I've been working on couple of "different" stuff off-late. On our ASP.Net website we've be using the built in In-Proc Cache to cache our data-objects and when you have a pretty decent cluster size, you run into data-consistence issue apart from having to figure out how to purge caches which are not scattered all over your web-farm. I've been thinking of getting some centralized caching engine for a while and after giving MS Velocity (or whatever it's called now) & Memcached a trial, I've decided to go with memcached along with the enyim client library. We haven't rolled it out on production yet, but in our Dev environment things actually look quite good - no exceptions, good Cache-hit rates. I'll post the entire experience with memcached and integrating with asp.net in a separate blog.
The other thing that technically, I've been looking into is reverse-proxying our web servers. I compared both Squid & Varnish, and zeroed in on Varnish based on the online material available. We already have Varnish set-up before our solr-slaves (because it's quite easy to configure varnish to do that and you get about 40-50% reduction in response times) on production, and we haven't seen any issues with it. Our Varnish cache-hit rates have been actually quite low ~around 30%, which is something that we need to look at - cause to benefit from a reverse-proxy, you would want to have your cache-hits to be around 60-70% on an average. One drawback with Varnish is the documentation available on VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) but I guess if you are clear about your caching strategy, it's not that hard to write one.
Varnishing solr is actually a piece of cake (as you don't have to worry about anonymous v/s authenticated users, session cookies, persistent cookies etc) but when it comes to Varnishing your public web-servers, things can get quite tricky. I'll post in detail, the experiences & things that I learned while Varnishing our web front-ends in another post. By the way, we've been running Varnish before the IIS on our dev environment and things have been looking quite alright so far.
One last thing on the technical stuff - we've been monitoring the performances of our memcached & varnish using munin - more on this in some other post as usual. I know this is lot of Linux stuff for a .net shop but the fact is - I didn't find any good Windows alternative for the above stuff which was free and proved itself to be quite scalable.
Moving on - as some of you would know, photography has been a hobby & a stress-reliever for me. On the photography front - after quite a bit of contemplation I got myself the Cactus triggers so that I can move my Vivitar 285HV off-camera. Well, so far they have been working like a charm. The first shot that I tried; armed with my new off-camera flash capabilities was freezing the water splash - and after 54 shots in the darkness, I did get on keeper -
 |
| lemonade! |
I'll post about the setup and how I went about this in another post. The other news on the photography front is that I did manage to sell on of my images on fotolia (no I am not a millionaire yet!).
Lastly, I have started playing the guitar again - it's been so many years since I last strummed so it's like I am learning anew!
Well, that pretty much sums up what I've been up to all this while, hopefully, I'll be a little bit more frequent with my posting habits.
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