What To Do When Your Web Application Goes Viral

http://dlo.me/what-to-do-when-your-site-goes-viral/

by theli0nheart • 15 years ago

115 18 15 years ago

Joakal• 15 years ago

Memcached multiget has an issue if you become the size of Facebook apparently: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebooks-memcach...

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!

theli0nheart3• 15 years ago

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.

messel• 15 years ago

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.

theli0nheart3• 15 years ago

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

liamotootle• 15 years ago

Hat's off to you. Nice write up - looking forward to learning from the code you're sharing as well. Thank you.

ilkandi2• 15 years ago

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

skmurphy• 15 years ago

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

mmaunder2• 15 years ago

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.

theli0nheart3• 15 years ago

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).

mmaunder2• 15 years ago

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

jacques_chester• 15 years ago

Good writeup.

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

bemmu• 15 years ago

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?

mrcalzone• 15 years ago

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

sktrdie• 15 years ago

shouldn't your gf be mad about this?

ignifero• 15 years ago

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.

ilkandi2• 15 years ago

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.

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

| 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.

DanielRibeiro• 15 years ago

CloudKick Expensive!

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

What To Do When Your Web Application Goes Viral

Related Stories