The MadPilot Produtions office will be closed from the 24th of December until the 5th of January.
Whilst I'll be periodically checking that 88 Miles, I won't be checking email very regularly during that time, so by all means, continue sending any email, just don't be offended if you don't get a response until early 2009!
So have a safe holiday season, and I look forward to tracking your time in 2009!
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been experimenting with some optimisations at all points of the 88 Miles stack — everywhere from code to database queries to database optimisation and Apache configuration. Because of the downtime today, I though I'd finish off some of those optimisations and push them live.
At the server level, 88 Miles is now running Passenger (aka mod_rails) instead of Mongrel, which better utilises memory and doesn't require the overhead of proxing. It's also a lot more reliable and stable (especially when it comes to restarting or pushing out new versions). Although I must admit, this mornings downtime was more to do with some overzealous settings than anything else — I think we are at a sweet spot now, so I don't think I'll need to touch it again for a while.
Much of the code for the core functionality was written quite a while a go, and was in dire need for a clean up. There was a lot of unnecessary iteration and object instantiation that resulted in really long load times for the main page (as well as for punching in and punching out). By pushing more of the work to the database and utilising the fact that a DB is better at searching for things than my code is, I managed a 4x speed increase.
However, that wasn't quite enough! By adding some database indexed to regularly used foreign keys, I managed to bump that speed increase to nearly 10x! And this is just the start — the priority at the moment is the speed and stability of the system.
Hopefully you will notice the speed increase — there is, of course, things out of my control, such as network latency and server load — however on the whole, you should be getting a much snappier 88 Miles experience.
The server has been restarted successfully. I'll be looking into the configuration to stop this happening again.
Again, thanks for you patience.
88 Miles is currently experiencing some server issues. We are working with our hosting provider to fix the problem.
Sorry for any inconvenience
Just a quick update — due to some people complaining about the speed of the reports, I've just pushed some fixes that by my less than scientific calculations speed things up by between 300%–800% depending on the number of projects you have!
The speed up also applies to the “View recent shift summary” function too.
Many on you would know that 88 Miles has had OpenID, OAuth and webservices for a while, and I'm quite a proponent of all three.
I'm lucky enough to be presenting a talk at Web directions in Sydney at the end of September. If you are lucky enough to be going to WDS08, please drop me a line!
Business Review Weekly released it's list of top 100 Australian web 2.0 lists today and 88 Miles came in at number 58!
There are some pretty cool apps on the list, including big players like Atlassian and of course our good friends Saasu.com, Scouta and Norg Media.
Rounding up the Perth list we have The broth, Minit, Buzka, Gooruze.
Congratulations to everyone who made the list!
An online version of the list can be seen here.
Fellow Aussie SaaS provider and all-round nice guys, Saasu.com have taken out the an award at CeBIT 2008.
Congratulations guys, It's just a shame that time commitments prevented me going over to Syndey for the event.
Just a quick note that 88 Miles will be down for about 30 minutes on Friday, 23 May from 6am UTC (2pm Perth time), as our hosting provider will be performing some hardware upgrades.
Sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.
I just noticed that that 88 Miles was mentioned in PCMag, along with a 529 other hints and tips...
