
What To Do When Your Web Application Goes Viral - theli0nheart
http://dlo.me/what-to-do-when-your-site-goes-viral/
======
Joakal
Memcached multiget has an issue if you become the size of Facebook apparently:
[http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-
memcach...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-memcached-
multiget-hole-more-machines-more-capacit.html)

The yellow was distracting though, that made me think I had the browser's Find
open.

Did you end up reading or getting a friend to do business-related? What was it
like?

Nice write up. Congratulations on being successful!

~~~
theli0nheart
Thanks!

I actually did go through a lot of them, but there were so many emails /
outreaches that it was pretty much impossible to personally respond to
everybody. I forwarded most of the emails to a few of my friends who actually
did an amazing job of getting in touch and following up. Things have worked
out pretty well so far :)

Phone calls especially are my weak point. A thirty minute conversation in the
middle of the day is enough to destroy my productivity for an entire
afternoon. So I tried to avoid as many of those as I possibly could.

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mmaunder
I have to disagree with 4 and 5. Logging everything will quickly run you out
of disk space. Checking email is the best source of bug reports. Thats one of
the coolest things about having a viral app. Many devs have to root out the
bugs themselves or get told weeks later by a user. If you're viral they come
screaming in within minutes of a new release.

~~~
theli0nheart
Appreciate the comments!

If you're on your own server, you don't need to be running with the debug
loglevel unless you really need it. But if you really need it, you won't be
screwed: all you need to do is configure logrotate's size parameter to a
reasonable value. Most logs compress very well.

On 5, I honestly would have thought your line of thinking was right before
this fiasco, but the vast majority of my emails were not bug reports. Most bug
reports came through Twitter and Uservoice (when I had it up).

~~~
mmaunder
OK. Appending to a file does cost a little, so keep an eye on iowait.

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skmurphy
The 99% case is "what to do when your web application languishes in obscurity"
or "what to do before your application goes viral."

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jacques_chester
Good writeup.

I think the term of trade for "log everything", in the sense that you used it,
is tracing.

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messel
Do you have an repo of your template django app hanging around? I'm learning a
little python now and looking for more functioning examples. I was starting
with flask, since it's been a couple of years since I used django.

~~~
theli0nheart
Nope, but I could certainly post it. Give me a few minutes and it'll be on
Github.

Edit: Just committed. <https://github.com/dlo/django-on-appengine>

~~~
ilkandi
Thank you for the submission. I found the writeup short, clear and very
useful. Kudos on being a fast developer too.

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beaumartinez
| _Deciding to pull in profile data in the back end [...] was a very bad
decision [...] you can easily get this information through the Facebook
JavaScript API._

Aren't you open to the client lying to you, though? Requesting the information
in the client and having it send it to the server gives you less of a
guarantee of its validity than if you did it entirely in the server.

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bemmu
Do you develop your app locally using googleappenginelauncher? If so, do you
have a script for filling it with data from production data store or how do
you get test data?

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mrcalzone
This might not be a problem on Appstore, but in general I would think a lot of
logging would impact the server performance?

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DanielRibeiro
_CloudKick Expensive!_

Actually cloudkick has a free plan, that works on one server only.

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ignifero
Something crucial is not mentioned in the article: What is the traffic you
receive? The facebook page lists 11K fans. I disagree with "don't check
email". Users do a much better job at testing our apps than ourselves. I 've
essentially stopped monitoring my own apps thanks to them.

~~~
ilkandi
He essentially said, "don't check email yourself". Any friend/colleague/temp
can do that and sort/categorize it for you. Only the developer can do fixes.
More effective that way.

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sktrdie
shouldn't your gf be mad about this?

