We made it through another year, so it's time for an update on how The Mail Archive is doing. I'm quite distracted by many life changes, not the least of which is trying to housebreak a brand new puppy (what?! again?) Hopefully I won't leave too many important things out about the project.
First of all, we experienced a 50% growth rate. That's right, we're now officially a triumvirate. Big welcome to Tom, to whom I entirely credit Jeff's and my continued sanity. Message count also made a pretty big leap, we started the year with a little over a 50 million messages and finished with over 70 million. I have high hopes that 2010 will break the 100 million barrier. The hardware has been holding up beautifully and this is one of the few years we haven't even been tempted to upgrade. Once terabyte+ SSDs come out, I'm sure that temptation will come right back. And the fun level remains high. Besides the satisfaction of making hundreds of thousands of people's lives ever so slightly better every day, it was great to talk with peers on the conference. Didn't hurt to have beautiful Canada as a venue. Financially the service remains healthy and we continue to donate a portion of proceeds to good but occasionally eccentric causes. Got to love this German article, "I am sorry that we all bumbled about computers far too much. We want to support people who committed themselves to a higher goal." http://www.ftd.de/lifestyle/outofoffice/:out-of-office-unendliche-waisen/50017386.html Of course, not everything in 2009 was puppy dogs and kibble. There were two power failures at the (supposedly) battery backed professional datacenter, one of which required a lot of time to recover from. Filesystems really don't like to be interrupted with tons of data in flight and we ended up cracking open one of the backups, and replaying a mail spool. And we struggled in our attempts to reliably overlay a solid state drive (for writes) on top of the traditional rotating magnetic disks containing the majority of the corpus. I do want to commend Junjiro Okajima, a Linux kernel hacker, for his excellent assistance; for a while The Mail Archive was running customized kernel code which is clearly a milestone of some sort. Anyway, while the last month or so has been perfect, November was bad enough that uptime fell slightly short of the Ivory Soap standard. (99.44%). This regression is hopefully addressed with an in-rack UPS and going back to a simpler setup. Overall, thank you all for sticking with the service and we wish you a happy, healthy, and enjoyable new year. As always, questions and comments welcome.
