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News

Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent technical news, read the ChangeLog.


[ << Previous 20 ]

Volunteer Your PC!
Sunday, Apr 8th, 2001 -- 2:34 am

bradfitz
Normally I don't put up news that people ask me to, but this one is kinda cool:
Submitted by Tony Sutton:

Would you like to volunteer your computer to help with the research for Cancer? If so, why don't you join the LiveJournal Team, which Scott Freeman recently created. At the moment, we have 15 members and it's growing. But we need more! And there is where you can help.

United Devices is similar to SETI@Home but United Devices is for researching cancer, where they're looking for a cure. The team was created because cancer is a killer, and we want to help to find a cure for it.

You can download the clients from here and it's available to Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4 and 2000. Linux and Macintosh versions should be available soon.

Hope to see you aboard!
So, if you have a free Windows machine and like using spare CPU cycles, this might be a useful and fun way to spend them. I just joined the team, but I'm not doing too well because I only have Windows on one computer.

Yes, it was a joke.
Monday, Apr 2nd, 2001 -- 8:38 am

bradfitz
Just so people will stop emailing me: yes, my post yesterday was an April Fool's joke.

LiveJournal is not shutting down. :-)

There was a lot of truth in what I said, which several of you were quick to point out. Actually, you all must have known there was truth in it, else it wouldn't have been so believable.

I'm really optimistic about LiveJournal's future and I'm not going to stop caring about it anytime soon. I am enjoying a nice little break from it, though. It's giving me time to clear my head and think about different ways to attack LJ problems that I was too frustrated to realize before. Also, maybe the game server I've been working on the last few days will be integrated into LiveJournal.

Several people asked if this was all a ploy to get more people to get paid accounts. No, it wasn't. I hadn't actually thought of that until the first person mentioned it, at which time I checked the number of incoming payments.... there wasn't any increase. Not sure if that's good or bad. ;-)

It's been fun...
Sunday, Apr 1st, 2001 -- 12:01 am

bradfitz
I'd like to thank everybody that's used and supported LiveJournal over the past few months. It's been fun... we've made a ton of new features from your feedback, we keep doubling in size, we keep getting new servers, and our revenue continues to increase.

However, my stress has continued to increase too, and I've long since run out of free time. My free time that I used to spend working on LiveJournal for fun has now been replaced by time that I have to work on LiveJournal.

I like to design things ... I like to program. I don't like doing business stuff, or system administration. Lately I've started working on a project not related to LiveJournal, and not a website or database. It's incredibly relaxing being able to go to bed at night and know that my program can't break in the middle of the night because it's not even running. The next day I can get up and work on it right where I left off, and not have to worry about the servers all breaking that it runs on.

Really, I just need to stop doing LiveJournal. I need to get free time back, and need to get rid of stress. LiveJournal's growing way too fast for me to stay sane...

I'm going to shut off all new accounts at the end of this week.

Users with early adopter accounts, paid accounts, and permanent accounts will be able to continue to post in their journals. All users will still be able to comment in each other's journals.

My motivation for doing this is that it'll signifigantly slow LiveJournal's growth rate. (In fact, it should reverse it.) I had no problem running LiveJournal in the past, but it's too big now. It's not my life goal to run this site all by myself, and although a ton of you have been helping me out, it's never enough. I still have to do way too much stuff that people have failed to take off my back. I figure that once LiveJournal's new accounts are stopped I can work on just getting the site fast and reliable, to the point where I no longer have to work on it much, and then I can go get a real job where I actually get challenged and get to work with other people.

I'll continue to program, but it's not going to be web/db stuff. I'd like to start contributing to more existing projects that I've used for so long but never given back to (Linux, Apache, etc...).

I know there is going to be a huge adverse reaction to this, and I'm sorry. The source code for the site is all available, though, so I hope somebody else will take up development and continue to run it.

Signing off,
Brad

New Mood Icons
Saturday, Mar 24th, 2001 -- 9:31 pm

evan
To use these on your journal, go to the Modify Journal page.

To browse the available mood icons, go to the mood list.

Open source!
Saturday, Mar 24th, 2001 -- 2:33 pm

bradfitz
LiveJournal's always been very open-source friendly, publishing the protocol and making the source for all the clients available, but now we've released the source to everything under the GPL.

Curious how LJ works on the inside? The source is here. Read the lj_dev announcement for more information.

I'd post more now and advocate open source or explain why this won't kill LiveJournal (in fact, it'll help!), but it's a nice day out and there are dozens of websites out there explaining why open source works, so I'll save it for later.

Happy hackin'.

Fundraiser status
Sunday, Mar 18th, 2001 -- 5:56 pm

bradfitz
I shut down the fundraiser because it looked like we'd be approaching our goal with the payments that were coming in through the mail. We've collected about $8,000.

I was getting pretty excited and then my accountant (**coughmomcough**) called me to "talk business" ... turns out we don't have $11-$12k in the bank... that was before paying several bills and paying for the new servers and server parts. We instead have about $7k.

So, now we have $7k existing + $1k for some work I did for somebody (not LiveJournal.com but still bradfitz.com, inc.) + $8k in PayPal + $2k that's on its way in the mail for the fundraiser. That puts us at $18k --- $3,000 short of the $21k for the new server and disk array.

At this point we could either just wait for the money to come in through normal paid accounts (should take 10-20 days, maybe ... rough guess), or we could sell another 30 permanent accounts. I really don't want to sell tons of permanent accounts though if it'd devalue them in the minds of the 100 that already bought them.

It should also be noted that we don't really need the $3,000 soon --- the site will run for long enough on the existing database server. The only thing it'd delay is having the photo server setup.

So, I'm going to use this sexy new poll thing to ask your advice. Feel free to leave comments too.

Heh ... polls are fun. :-)

A treat for y'all.
Sunday, Mar 18th, 2001 -- 9:48 am

bradfitz
To show my appreciate for everybody that's been buying both paid accounts and the permanent accounts recently, I've completed a new feature. All it took was 12 hours straight in this chair without going to bed! :-)

Now we can do fun things like this. [Note: used to be inlined, but changed to just a link]

Isn't that fun? Oh, I bet you all want to know how to do this, huh? I even wrote up instructions.

Enjoy!

$10K update
Saturday, Mar 17th, 2001 -- 8:39 pm

bradfitz
Just wanted to post a quick update on the fundraiser status...

Currently we've collected $4,900, with at least $900 more reportedly on its way in the mail. That leaves 42 permanent accounts left.

Ya know, I thought we could sell these things, but I thought it'd take 2 weeks, not 2 days.

Wow, thanks everybody! I don't really know how to express my appreciation in words, so I'll just go make some fun new LJ features for y'all. :-)
 
Current Mood: happy

New Mood Icons
Saturday, Mar 17th, 2001 -- 4:41 pm

evan
Charity has been very busy: She has created four new mood icon sets for you!

  • Stars:
  • Faces:
  • Faces (animated):
  • Aliens:
To use any of these on your journal, go to the Modify Journal page.

Thanks, Charity!

Fund raiser!
Friday, Mar 16th, 2001 -- 2:06 pm

bradfitz
The upgrade last night was a pain, but boy did it pay off... I'm looking at stats for all the machines and it's amazing what a difference it made. Hell, just use the site... incredibly fast. We're pushing out by far record bandwidth and the database isn't even breaking a sweat.

However, this isn't time to get too happy .... we need to stay ahead of the problems. We did better this last round of problems than the first one (the slowness only lasting a few days), but our idea from here on out is to have as few problems as possible. We pretty much have the money and talent we need now to keep livejournal always running fast and we're going to work to do even better.

To raise the last bit of cash we need for our new database server, we're having a fund raiser. The idea is to raise $10,000 as quickly as possible ... "100 people, 100 bucks".

Go check it out. Even if you don't have $100 to spend right now, there's some good reading on that page if you're interested in LiveJournal's present status and future plans.

Ummm... yeah.
Friday, Mar 16th, 2001 -- 3:49 am

bradfitz
If any part of that upgrade could've gone wrong, it did. Seriously, what a pain. LFS still isn't working, but we can finish that remotely.

The new memory is being used already... that should provide a real noticeable speed improvement. The new disks are setup and working, but not being used yet. I'll set those up tomorrow.

Evan and I are frickin' tired and want to go home.

Dormando, thanks for the assistance. Sometimes we're even normal and coherent.

Planned Downtime
Thursday, Mar 15th, 2001 -- 5:02 pm

bradfitz
LiveJournal will be down tonight at 3:00am until as late as 4:00am (PST; -0800 GMT) while we upgrade the database server.

We're bringing its memory up from 512 MB to 1024 MB, adding another two drives (10,000 rpm, 18 gig) to the existing 7,200 rpm 9 gig set and 18 gig set., upgrading glibc, and rebuilding the kernel.

All of this will make for a much speedier LiveJournal.

<geek>Memory obviously helps... more of the database can be in memory without going to the disks. New disks will help, not because we're out of space, but because they're too busy reading and writing now... spreading the tables out among different disks increases throughput. The new glibc and new kernel is for large file support (files over 2G) ... yes, we run Linux on the database, not freebsd.</geek>

However, we don't plan to keep this machine as our database for much longer.... we've made plans to purchase a new database server but first we need to come up with $21,000 ... we already have $10,000 or so available. We're going to have a fund raiser shortly here to raise the other $10k.... more on that later. Once we get the new database server the current one (which we're upgrading tonight) will become the photo gallery server. Users will be able to upload their photo albums and have automatic thumbnail galleries and such, integrated (or not integrated) with other LiveJournal features.

But I'm rambling. Just letting everybody know the site will be down tonight. Embedded journals will just show up blank, and all other journals will have a "Down for maintenance message".

Mad props to evan and dormando for staying up with me tonight to do this.

It shouldn't take a whole hour.... we've researched every step of the upgrade pretty well, so it should be pretty painless. I'll update when we're done.

Bucket o' news
Friday, Mar 9th, 2001 -- 10:30 pm

bradfitz
Wow, it's been awhile since I posted an update in news. That's not to say that nothing's been going on, though... I've just been too busy to post anything.

Many exciting things going on....

New Hardware
We keep growing, so we keep needing new hardware. My apologies for the few days awhile ago when LJ totally sucked. Webservers are easy to keep adding (except for Stan which is broken physically), but the database and the speed of the disks were starting to become a problem so I removed a number of calls to the database leaving the results cached in the webservers, we changed some queries around, we spread unrelated tables between disks, etc... In addition to tuning types of things, we're adding another 512 MB of memory to cartman (the db server), and adding two new 10,000 RPM drives. All these changes should keep things running nicely until we have enough money for our new database server.

The new database server that we're looking at is a dual-processor Alpha (64-bit) with 4MB of cache per ship, 2G of DDR memory and a nice external RAID 10 array. dormando is doing a lot of the research for this... he's also been helping out a ton with sysadmin stuff, which relieves a ton of my stress. The "bad" news about the new database server is that it'll cost around $21,000 for everything... including the RAID array. This is a lot, but we have around $10,000 now, and the money continues to come in for paid accounts (plug). If you've been waiting for a good time to get a paid account, now would be it. Why? Well, we need the money, but also...

Photo Server
When we have the new database server, we're going to convert cartman into the photo album server, giving paid users space to upload pictures and have automatic thumbnail gallerys and everything... giving titles pictures, descriptions, etc... along with optional integration with other LiveJournal features. We haven't decided details, but it'll probably be like free users will have a little or no space, existing paid users will get some bonus space, new paid users will get 'x' amount of space, and any paid user will be able to buy more space. Our main motivation for this is that so many people ask us how to put images in their journal and so many webhosts nowadays don't allow you to upload pictures and reference them from other sites. Plus, the thumbnail pages will be all customizable (once S2 is done) and it'll just be cool. Hell, I just want to upload my entire photo archive. :-) I might even start working on the image server before we have the new database server, but its use will be limited.

Chat Rooms
I've given in. I've always told people to "just use IRC" for chatting in the past, but now I realize we need something "better"... probably a pretty Java interface to an IRC server running on LiveJournal that uses LJ usernames and passwords for authentication. Recommendations on extensible irc servers?

New Style System
You've probably heard about S2, the new style system. I had to put it on hold to deal with system issues, but in a few days my finals are over and I'll have about 2 weeks to work on it. Evan's going to be helping me too, if I can rip him away from his own projects. :-) S2 will rule.... I can tell that already from the work I've done on it. I see some of the styles you all have made and it just pains me to think how much effort you probably had to go through to get the current style system to behave. I also see some really poor styles and blame it on the complexity of the current system. The new system is also a lot faster to process, so the servers should be faster in the end.

Open Source!
We're releasing all of the LJ source code to the public. Currently there are a dozen or so people from lj_dev auditing it for security holes and major bugs. The plan is to have all their feedback in by the 16th or 17th, and then I'll release it to everyone (GPL'ed) on the 17th. The idea here is that there are a ton of people that want to help work on LJ, and it's too big for me to control anymore by myself.

So many helpers!
I can't even begin to list and thank all the people that have been helping out lately... I'm really happy things are working so well. I just wish LJ had enough money to buy new hardware and pay for a few of your salaries so you didn't have to do your regular jobs. :-) If any of the new users are reading this and are confused, let me clear something up.... LiveJournal is not a big venture-capital funded pre-IPO company... it's run by the people that use it. We're not even paid. Maybe one day, but for now we all do it in our spare time and all the money goes for new servers and stuff. Want to get involved? Go join the lj_biz and offer to work on something, or ask what needs work on!

Ummm...
I forgot what else. I thought I had more to say. I'll post later when I remember.

Problems
Tuesday, Feb 27th, 2001 -- 8:56 pm

bradfitz
Yes, I know.

Everything sucks today, but there's little I can do to fix it... the slowness problem is because one of the new servers we got recently came with bad memory so we can't use it without it crashing. We're waiting for the vendor to ship us the new memory (tomorrow we should get it?). Then, we can put up the slave database. Currently that's the bottleneck --- too many reads and writes are being performed on the same database, causing too much locking. We were on schedule to have a slave setup ahead of time, but got screwed with the bad memory... now one of the servers has to do web requests instead.

And--- the lost entries. Yes... that pissed me off too. I lost several before I noticed. I'm surprised people didn't contact me sooner. Turns out one of the tables went corrupt. Stupid database... Grrr. I hate it when I have to deal with other people's bugs and mistakes.

But, it's my fault, too.... I didn't check the return status from one of the queries that I should've, so it appeared that everything was okay. I used to check the status there, but then I added a query after it, pushing the return status check down a line, making the first query go unchecked. Stupid mistake on my part, which is now corrected, should the database mess up more in the future (which I'm sure it will.... *sigh*).

And yes, they're gone .... sorry. I wish I could recover them, but I can't. It shouldn't happen in the future, though, if that's any consolation.

I'm in a grumpy mood because it's approaching finals and school's getting stressful.

And telling me, "just ignore it for awhile.... work on school" doesn't work. I hate school... I'm addicted to LJ too. When it doesn't work I get angry.

Once the new memory comes to fix lj-stan, things will be signifigantly faster. Thursday? Friday?

Login problems really fixed
Saturday, Feb 24th, 2001 -- 3:53 am

bradfitz
After some fun on the mod_backhand mailing list and an offline conversation with the maintainer, things are all working now with the load balancing destroying cookies.... logging in and out should work flawlessly now.

I spent a lot of time testing it to confirm the new fix actually works.... I beat it up in every way I could imagine and I can't get it to break. Of course, let me know if you run into problems. (god I hope not.)

If you're curious, the "fix" that the mod_backhand people put out earlier (when I first announced it) was a correct fix, but Internet Explorer is broken, so it had to be worked around, just as it turns out Apache has to work around it too.

Broken software, everywhere.

Next mission: get the directory back up by either 1) isolating the MySQL bug and getting it fixed, or 2) putting a separate db server up just for directory queries that can crash at will without taking down the rest of the site.

Login problems fixed
Thursday, Feb 22nd, 2001 -- 6:22 pm

bradfitz
If you had problems logging in before, they should be fixed now. For details, read this.

With that worry out of the way, now we can focus on sending in bug reports for the database crashes we've been seeing lately. (which is the main reason that the directory isn't up yet...)

If everybody's software worked perfect, life would be a lot easier, but instead I spend most my time lately hunting down bugs in packages that LiveJournal uses to run. Fun fun. *sigh*

Update: Apparently bugs remains. Great.

Routing problems.
Tuesday, Feb 20th, 2001 -- 11:08 am

bradfitz
If you've had trouble reach LiveJournal the past few days, you're not the only one. There's nothing I can do to fix it, though. The problem is with Verio.

Here's an email from the network guy at speakeasy where LiveJournal is colo'ed at:

It's a routing problem exclusively with verio. Our upstream provider, Internap, is working with them to clear this up. At this time, Internap has noticed a number of routing anomalies coming fromt the verio network. This isn't the only one.

I'll post more when I know more. Sending me more traceroutes won't help.... we know where the problem is.

Update:

Internap has informed me that the problems with verio have been resolved at this time. I can now successfully hit all the example IPs you gave me from my box in colo on the same subnet as livejournal, and they claim verio hosts can hit our border router on that wire now as well.

Login problems
Tuesday, Feb 20th, 2001 -- 1:59 am

bradfitz
Yes, I know some of you are having problems with the site forgetting that you're logged in.

We're aware of the problem, and know what's causing it, but it's not code of ours, so it'll take a little longer to get fixed.

The problem is mod_backhand and how it deals with multiple cookie headers in HTTP requests and responses. mod_backhand is the software that manages the load between the multiple servers.

If anybody wants to fix the mod_backhand code, let me know. Otherwise I'm going to work around their bug, or see if its maintainer has time to fix it.

One way to fix this would be to turn all but the one original web server off, but then the site would be slow. We can live with this little problem for a day or so.

Servers online!
Friday, Feb 16th, 2001 -- 4:09 am

bradfitz
Good news! The two new web servers online and working now..... they've actually been online for about a week, but I haven't had a chance to finish setting them up until tonight. A lot of things changed behind the scenes, so if anything weird is going on, please report it.

I'm going to sleep now... if anything major breaks, evan or revjim will call me. However, things are pretty well tested.... everything should be fast today as people are sitting around work and school bored and pounding on LiveJournal.

Enjoy the speed! Thanks again to everybody that's bought paid accounts (nice plug, eh?) .... Seriously though, it's the people that send in money that make this whole project succeed. Without you guys, we'd be unable to buy new servers when things got slow, and we would have never been able to grow this much.

Now that this is out of the way, I'm going to focus on getting all the developers whatever they need to keep working effectively (a few people are waiting on me to do/fix something for them), and then I'm going to shut myself off from everything for several days and work on the new style system, S2.

Slow, yeah.
Monday, Feb 12th, 2001 -- 4:42 pm

bradfitz
LiveJournal's slow today ... yeah. The new servers are installed at the colo place, but I haven't finished setting them up yet. I'll try and have it done tomorrow evening. Stupid other crap **coughschoolcough** is getting in the way.

[ << Previous 20 ]