Comments on: Making Gravatar fast again

By: varnish reverse proxy server by Video Sharing Script

varnish reverse proxy server by Video Sharing Script — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:19:37 +0000

[...] Read about wordpress.com scaling at http://barry.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/making-gravatar-fast-again/ [...]

By: kenpem

kenpem — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:36:35 +0000

Now we just need the rest of the world to adopt gravatar as a standard and we’re happy

By: Trent

Trent — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:15:30 +0000

The IT world is pretty lucky that you put up the architecture and strategies that you use Barry on all these different setups! Sometimes though I think you might need a glossary of terms for us people who don’t speak wrangler, but great stuff, none the less!

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:26:40 +0000

Bruno,

Currently it is manual because the automatic failover portion is not complete yet, but it should be finished this week. The basic idea is that each datacenter will also have a server that serves DNS requests. Each datacenter’s DNS server will only return its own IP when queried. There are some additional monitoring scripts that check the application and cache server and make sure all is functioning normally, otherwise stop the DNS service. In the case of a server or datacenter outage, the IP of the failed node will not be returned via DNS so traffic will automatically failover to the other location. There are DNS TTLs to deal with, but they can be set very low so impact is minimal.

I will probably write a separate post on this setup with more details once its complete.

By: Bruno

Bruno — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:30:05 +0000

Hi, interesting post.

So, you have a cache & application server in each of your datacenter.

Do you manually fallback to the other one if one datacenter is in trouble by changing the DNS entry?

Or you have something more automatic?

By: Donncha’s Tuesday Links at Holy Shmoly!

Donncha’s Tuesday Links at Holy Shmoly! — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:41:43 +0000

[...] reveals some of the details behind what powers Gravatar [...]

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:08:02 +0000

James, We are using Munin to graph the data. There are Varnish graphing plugins available.

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:05:54 +0000

John,

The working set is only about 1GB (lucky us!)

Having an infinite expiry would require cache invalidation which is not something that we are currently doing on Gravatar.

By: Links for Mon 29 Oct 2007 | Joseph Scott's Blog

Links for Mon 29 Oct 2007 | Joseph Scott's Blog — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:27:42 +0000

[...] Making Gravatar fast again | Barry on WordPress – Details from Barry on what Automattic is using to run Gravatar. Tags: gravatar [...]

By: ArtLung Blog » Misc, Misc, everywhere… and not a drop to drink

ArtLung Blog » Misc, Misc, everywhere… and not a drop to drink — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:48:00 +0000

[...] moved Gravatar to their infrastructure which has gone well, the blog High Scalability pointed out Making Gravatar Fast Again. Cool stuff, and will help them avoid “crashing hard” moments. The Gravatar article [...]