I can improve that!

So last couple of weeks have been quite crazy, trying to manage working on several projects along with some trips around Europe is both tiring and time consuming. Still, I don’t want to let this occasion go without a post for future reference.

I reached my first million! Well, million pageviews/day anyway. Although I suspect that if I would be referring to money, it would be more exciting, I feel this is also a remarkable milestone in my career!

For the past months, my team and I have been trying to cope with the continuous increase in traffic on our web application, the high demand peaks were getting out of control. Even though the architecture is horizontal scalable, it isn’t cost-wise to scale up just for those timed peaks and using something like Amazon EC2 is an option but still down the road.

In the end it took a crazy last minute deployment of a Django custom cache middleware I had been working in the past days. I should say that I’m not a fan of this rushed updates under pressure and usually strongly oppose to do it, but hey, this time it went great, results were awesome and it allowed us to reach the amazing value of 1,232,158 pageviews in one day! WOW!

For the same period, one of the machines processor usage looked something like:

Notice the difference there around 2:00PM after we deployed that new middleware, impressive right?!

Now since I think we aren’t done yet, and want to write about the first 10 million/day, I’m going back to work! More on the revised cache system on the following days, after a scheduled enhancement deployment, that promises results even more impressive!