I don't live in America and haven't been for years. Noticed I have logins with "tch network services" and have no idea why that would be the case. I don't use any VPN services (esp. not to login into my accounts). Anyone have any ideas?
It seems like a convention that exists for sites that want to force the user into their content even when they want to leave. Unless it is a file download link - I find it incredibly rude.
If not a dashboard, then it's periodic reports... Or reports pullable on demand.
There's got to be a way to measure things and plan for the future, and reports/graphs/etc help a lot with that.
I think reports are necessary, but a dashboard really helps everyone see at a glance how things are going.
If your up-time graph looks like a heartbeat monitor, everyone knows what that means.
Likewise for active customers being a downhill slope when viewed weekly.
Most of the time, those graphs are just going to give you happy thoughts, but sudden spikes or dips, or worrisome things like those above... Well, you can SEE them and they mean more, especially to non-technical types.
Yes, absolutely every startup I've talked to creates their own dashboard or dumps some results to excel periodically. And I've talked to a lot of them, as my company is addressing this issue. (chart.io YCS10)
I haven't really had to scale a system up like this before. As a freelance web developer moving to a bigger slice? on linode has been good enough for any wordpress blog or simple site.
That said, I didn't realize what a massive undertaking it could be like this describes.
Anyone had any similar scaling challenges with less conventional web-stacks? Im particular I'm wondering how a node.js/mongodb stack would do this same thing.
I have scaled many systems in the past and the easy answer is: Know what you're doing or hire someone who does.
There is no blanket answer because applications and workloads differ. E.g. MongoDB has a number of documented issues under high load (esp. high write load), in some scenarios they can be worked around with reasonable trade-offs, in some they can't and Mongo needs to be replaced.
If there's one general thing to say about scaling then that you scale applications, not stacks. The stack will usually change in the process.
> If there's one general thing to say about scaling then that you scale applications, not stacks.
very true! which is why i think it usually is a good idea to analyze how you could split up your application into more or less discrete subsystems/"services". that way it becomes easier to react to bottlenecks in the subsystems instead of having to operate on the whole system.
ideally you design your system like that in the beginning but usually you grow and find out the harder way... step by step.
still there are a couple of things that are "always (about) the same": for example do session mangagement or logging/sitestats usually put quite a bit more write load (INS/UPD/DEL) on a system than other parts of a system.
so if your product grows the write stress these subsystems/functionalities put on a system on the one hand and the read load from other subsystems on the other hand make it hard to optimize your db/storage systems because they have quite contrary I/O needs.
if you have separate subsystems that run as discrete services with their own API it becomes much easier to put out a fire that breaks out due to growth or load spikes.
so to add to the comment by moe:
"you scale applications" - and you get into a better position to do so if you design your applications in a way that they are composed of seperate subsystems that communicate via apis.
My mom used to have a power cleaning hour when I was growing up and that house was spotless! I can see how this kind of focused attention is great for getting through things that are a bit annoying to do.
Makes me think if machine translation is to improve it will almost certainly require human translators to contribute. The style in which Google is doing this seems like this will happen more often.
