

Ask HN: Please review my new Twitter recommendation engine - jqueryin

	Mofollow<p>http://www.mofollow.com<p>I tried submitting this late last night but Sunday traffic got zero reviews, sorry for the repost to those of you who already saw this (and if you did, where's my feedback?!).<p>I have been developing this site long before Twitter announced their user recommendation service but I've been hesitant to go public. There's a couple reasons behind my wariness:<p>1. It's currently only running on two linodes.<p>2. I wanted to ensure I had my MongoDB session handler working properly for scale out. If you notice any problems regarding sessions, please comment to let me know. I just enabled round-robin DNS and I had to fix a few hiccups along the way.<p>3. The number of API calls made to Twitter to generate a request is quite high, it's along the lines of ~105 requests if you have over 100 friends. Due to the sheer amount of data and handshakes being transferred, I was wary of both my bandwidth and the server load.<p>Oh well, here we go. It is quite likely you guys could get my servers to a crawl. If anybody is going to stress test my server, I would prefer if it's my fellow hackers to give appropriate feedback (and snarky comments) before I go entirely public with this thing.<p>I do plan on some form of integration with the new twitter recommendation API calls as well in the near future, but for now this is my completely custom version.<p>As a side note: I would appreciate it if you didn't tweet or blog about this as the site hasn't been stress tested and I'm just looking for some preliminary feedback.<p>I enjoy any and all comments and criticism.
======
mikecane
I gave it fifteen minutes and bailed.

~~~
jqueryin
Thanks for the reply. I'll check the error and access log files from this
morning and see if there's anything fishy going on.

It's not uncommon for it to take 5 minutes, but 15 is definitely indicative of
something far worse...

 _EDIT: found one issue; the secondary server was missing php-mbstring, which
caused problems with my utf-8 checks and conversions. sorry!_

~~~
mikecane
Does it matter that I was coming in with Firefox 2.x? Never had any problems
with other Twitter API services.

~~~
mikecane
OK, I started it a second time, let it churn while I was busy with other
things ... half hour later, still churning. Not going for a third time.

