On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 08:40 -0600, Adam Beguelin wrote: > I'm interested in understanding how Laconica scales. From what I can > tell, the main idea is that Laconica scales by allowing lots of > different sites work together in a federated way. This means that > anyone can setup their own instance of laconica. That instance of > laconica can connect to other instances of laconica by forwarding > updates.
That's one way. My feelings on scalability are this: Laconica should run on low-end commercial shared-hosting systems that support PHP and MySQL (albeit possibly with only Web interface working). It should also work on high-end public systems, of which Identi.ca is my main test case. Federation is one of the scalability factors, but I intend to do some architecture changes to make things more scalable in the near future. Including support for a AMQP queueing system like RabbitMQ or Apache QPID would be one such change. Probably moving some parts of the database from the RDBMS (MySQL or PostgreSQL) to a cloud-style distributed DB like Hypertable or CloudDb woudl be another. > Are there any existing examples of federated copies of laconica > running? http://laconi.ca/Main/ListOfServers > Is the subscription sitewide or on a user by user basis. User-by-user. Subscription site-wide seems like a really stupid idea to me. > For example, would the public timeline of one site be replicated to > the subscribing site? No. The public timeline only shows messages posted on the local server. > How does one user subscribe to a user on another instance of laconica? They click a button underneath the user's avatar on their profile page. That starts off the OpenMicroBlogging subscription process, as described here: http://openmicroblogging.org/ > I'm also curious how a single instance of Laconica would scale. Say > identica became very popular and was getting overloaded, how would one > scale that particular instance of laconica? My guess is that the > bottleneck would be the database access and that going some master/ > slave architecture would be a first step. Yes, it's already doing that. > Is the underlying code > written to support this kind of scaling? Yes. > Is anyone running an > instance of laconica with more than an single database server? Yes, identi.ca does this. > I notice that the table types are MyISAM. This is probably so MySQL > full text search can be used. Of course this won't work very well > once the notice table gets large (millions) and/or the update rate > increases. Agreed. I'm looking into optionally using Sphinx, a full-text search engine, as an alternative to MyISAM + FTS. > Sorry to ask so many questions! That's OK. I find scaling questions pretty annoying, since they usually come from people trying to look smarter than they actually are. http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.html -Evan
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