byteslice

It's (A)live!

Added 2019-12-21 01:25:34 +0000 UTC

Philomena is now running live as the main backend for Derpibooru, with booru-on-rails still running behind the scenes to power requests to the old APIs.

There is still a fair amount of work to be done, and things to implement that were missed in the beta thread, but as far as I can tell, it's here to stay and while I didn't implement absolutely everything, there's no need to roll back. Success!

I am now preparing the Rails source code for a Christmas release. The moment you've all been waiting for, I suppose.

Thanks to all those who tested.

Some stats on the deployment:

* Request execution time is, on average, about 60% of what it previously was. Image pages see the most impactful performance boost here, going from an average of 80ms to an average of 30ms on the new site.

* Request latency is down substantially, from 80ms at its typical maximum to less than 1ms. Jitter is also down substantially, as Erlang's garbage collection is substantially more efficient than Ruby's in a typical web request cycle. (This is reflective of both the power of the optimizing Erlang VM and the minimalistic design approach of the Phoenix framework.)

* Memory usage on fleetfoot is down by 17GB (13GB of unicorn appservers, plus an additional 4GB of cache that was no longer necessary, slated to go down further as we slim things out), and the load average has dropped by about 2. The load average decrease is less than I predicted, but still substantial.