So I dragged Seth up early this morning (hmm, well, yesterday morning I guess) to take me to the airport, and I am officially on my way to Japan… I’m on the plane as I write this post. I’ve already fallen asleep a few times and eaten my share of junk food (mmm, jelly bellies), so now I’m sufficiently awake enough to tell you all about the really cool things Elaine and I did this last week.
A couple weeks back, I mentioned that we decided to migrate our servers from Apache to LightTPD — in that posting, I gave a quick overview of why an event driven web server like LightTPD was much more suited to scaling meebo longterm. I also mentioned how we were thinking about using FastCGI to lessen the overhead of spawning so many CGI processes.
meebo is an interesting app because of the way that we utilize your web browser’s interaction with our servers. The user experience has to be snappy and lightweight, and as our user count grows (yay!) this becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Much to my surprise, after analyzing the options, we decided that FastCGI may not be the best route to follow (what a bummer that was =p).
As I mentioned previously, FastCGI does not fork a new CGI process every time a request is made from a client (saving a lot of overhead, and decreasing CPU load); instead, there are a few CGI servers that receive and process the requests. If there are ten processes waiting in line, FastCGI distributes them evenly, and when a process finishes, the next one in line gets its turn. Sounds great, right?`
meebo, however, requires a lot of sleeping processes that essentially do no work until necessary (sometimes waiting up to tens of seconds). As a result, we would have to spawn multiple FastCGIs per user, one for event polling, and the other to handle non-blocking requests like sending an IM or logging in. This makes the whole CGI layer very complicated, and unnecessarily heavy — the gains don’t seem to outweigh the losses.
So, to keep the design clean, simple, and scalable, we decided to throw out using CGIs altogether, fast or otherwise. This cuts out the middleman, and avoids another layer of complexity, hopefully decreasing the chances of things going wrong.
What did we use in the end? If any of you have used mod_perl or mod_php in Apache, you’ll know where I’m going. Instead of having the web serve spawn a CGI process, the web server talks to gaim directly through a custom module. mod_meebo, as we call it, parses the client requests and passes them to the backend gaim process; it’s simple and clean — no extra overhead.
We’d like to say a big thanks to Jan Kneschke, the creator of LightTPD, for building such a great, extensible web server. Without his general purpose module interface, things would’ve been much tougher.
We’ve been slowly rolling the module out this last week, one server at a time, and so far, the results are really promising. CPU loads have dropped nicely, and with a few more tweaks and optimizations, we’re hoping to scale even higher.
Oops, laptop battery is running low. I’ll talk to you all from Japan!
sandy
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:34 pm
Meebo is getting blocked in majority of IT firms in India, I guess fame does have a price to pay. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
October 24th, 2005 at 12:59 am
Oh no! Not good!!! Very sorry
October 24th, 2005 at 6:47 am
hey it’s good, but i can’t veiw ppl’s info. you could change that….overall, i like it
October 24th, 2005 at 8:31 am
Is there any way to have mirrors of Meebo at different hosts/domains to overcome the blocking of meebo.com by firms?
October 24th, 2005 at 10:01 am
Dear Sir,
I have found your tools as well as blogs here in India.
It’s excellent tools, now large numbers of visitors from India.
I like add this infromation in my blogs http://o3.indiatimes.com/seoindia.
Basically i am seo and directory moderator and seo trainer in India provides seo resources to various student.
Please send me reply if any new things.
Thanks
October 24th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
Can somone try this free web proxy with Meebo on a blocked host: http://www.hidemyass.com/ Let me know if it works.
October 24th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
I really enjoyed reading about your back-end. What an amazing GAIM array you guys are building! Have you thought about a more direct form of aggregate away message display?
October 25th, 2005 at 7:48 am
msn
October 26th, 2005 at 7:31 am
I just wanted to say “Thank-You” My son is with the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, KY and is now stationed in IRAQ. When I am at work, it is late afternoon early evening for him. This was told to me by a friend that I can sign into AIM and talk with my son without downloading the AIM program. I just wanted you guys to know that I am ever so grateful that I have a secure way to talk with my son on a daily basis.
Thanks!!
Mel
October 26th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
also you can use
http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
this server
October 27th, 2005 at 1:39 am
i’ve used thttpd/php (someone else linked above) to great success with a similar type of app (needed to scale to ~600+ transactions/sec) after trying in vain to make Apache perform as quickly.
if I were to do it all over again I’d use Python’s asyncore or Twisted frameworks (lightweight HTTP server functionality with the expressiveness and interoperability of python/non-fugliness of C), paired with psyco (python optimizer) which would have probably cut development time by 80-90% with similar performance (and would have been *much* more maintainable.)
hope this helps.
-drew
October 27th, 2005 at 3:04 am
thanks. I love meebo. Even my co blocked the msn and yahoo. I still chit chat using meebo. Great Job!
October 27th, 2005 at 3:24 am
Deshmukh is again criticising
October 27th, 2005 at 6:40 am
ZORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA NO ME TOKES LOS COJONES GUARRA ,D K ME VIENES AMI?? D LISTO O ALGO SUBNORMAL? ANDA TIRA X AHI GILIBOBO
October 27th, 2005 at 9:31 am
It’s great experience . excelent .rwally suprub. i can chat more than one login id. i love meebo. thanks for all meebo
October 27th, 2005 at 10:23 am
Hi Folks,
Thank you so much, very nice tool! Amazing.
Brazilians are here!
October 27th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Cool! I liked hearing about the technical details. Very interesting!! Look forward to reading more. GL
October 27th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
well i am the ne guy on the block who has ……….how u say………been @ the block…shit methinks i built the block sometimes…im not code savvy so im not hip to all the architectural developments of meebo but it soundd and looks great from here in atlanta…this bonghits for u folks job well done…….jus like me at the moment …welldone……. gnite
November 8th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
all my university are very gratefull with you….we have block the other programs of chat and now we can chat with ower friends while we are in clase!…thank you meebo!!!!
uruguay presente
November 9th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Congratulationsu are the best !!!
November 9th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
Hi sandy,
I am an Indian working in the multinational in India. It was incedental that I have seen meebo. Good work done. But does it have any security issues?? Suppose if someone hacks your server and passes junks and viruses to your users how will you prevent that?
I am an MBA and would like to start something on the software side. I am not a techy by myself but still have a flair towards it. If you have any plans to start any ventures in India do let me know. I found your group as an energetic and innovative one.
November 10th, 2005 at 4:41 am
increadablt stupid, veri idiotic , not good at all
November 10th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
oi! sou brasileira!passei aqui só para visitar bjus
November 12th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
hey i am ieasha well how are you ???? well for me fine well anyway how is were ever you rae i hope its good hey
well 1 g2bounce
November 14th, 2005 at 8:00 am
how do i use meebo to use as a chat or to get into my website from a school computer where a bunch of sh*** is blocked? thanks meebo please email me .
November 15th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
I host lan parties and use your site to keep in touch with several members to our group. I was wandering Recently your page has been blocked and in addition i am alway son the go is there a way we could run your scripts from our computer directly like on a usb jump drive or from our desktop for on the go or to bypass filters? please write me back i would greatly appreciate it even if we cannot have a meebomobile. A huge fan of your work of art. Keep up the great coding.
November 16th, 2005 at 3:57 am
Hi
*****************************************
If you find meebo is blocked at your place then try this. In place of http://meebo.com give https://meebo.com.
It should work.
**********************************************
November 16th, 2005 at 4:07 am
If it doesnt works then try this. This should work for sure.
http://193.238.160.99/webyahoo/start.jsp
Please let me know if it works.
Great work dude. I love the technical details. Keep it up!
November 16th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Well the thing is the sys admin is monitoring me and updating the filter accordingly so anyweb fix is temp. first i went to meebo.com then they blocked it. then i went to the mirrors first 1-8 then up to 18. then i used ip addresses then i used. then i tried converting to decimal. then to hex. all these things worked but eventually get blocked as well i need either a page that will run a proxy within or a script. i cant install any software. or a mobile version. Perhaps a script i can run form thje desktop. And i apreciate the yahoo site it wokred on this end but i only use aim. thanks all, i appreciate the feed back and look forward to future responses.
Solar Bang
November 17th, 2005 at 9:51 pm
Rafinha
rafalevasseur@hotmail.com
(21)99346773
Beijos!!!
November 18th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
hi pimps wot ya u 2
November 18th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
November 21st, 2005 at 12:40 pm
ok so the intelligense of this board went to slush. Awesome.
February 6th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
is their anymore proxies? 4 meebo all of them are block….????
February 16th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
well here in sunderland the swines are blocking meebo from schools and colleges and even the proxies are going down too.
boo hoo
March 19th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Looks like us loyal Dell employees are also falling victim to intelligent IT syndrome. Almost my entire department was using it at it works occasionally when either a sys admin or someone else high up logs in, but the url changes are all blocked as are the publically published proxies and ips. As mentioned above I think a desktop script or perhaps a site generated url/dynamic ip set could side step this in the long term. However, I’m not the uber-tech/coder I’m just a satisfied user, but I do miss my buddies and the job related advice they were able to relay meebo, so any solution, even temporary ones would be greatly appreciated.
Working Hard at Hardly Working
-Dellguy
March 23rd, 2006 at 8:57 pm
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April 11th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Hey folks, i converted meebo’s ip to hex n binary, but donno how to open the site from the browser wid these!!
April 18th, 2006 at 1:24 am
meebo…meebo…meebo… wow… what a goood idea guys..! I love meebo…like others my yahoo/msn connection is blocked but I can still chat using my yahoo ID. Thank you so much my friends.
April 18th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
hola que tal soy hondurena y no se como reistalar mi messenger que ven ayudenme si plis baya
April 18th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
hola alex estas en linea
April 18th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
hola hay alguien q pueda charlar con migo no verdad bueno bay
April 18th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
good one
April 23rd, 2006 at 12:42 pm
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May 27th, 2006 at 7:50 am
hey, I just found out about meebo. Its awesome!
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:10 am
how do i use meebo to use as a chat or to get into my website from a school computer where a bunch of sh*** is blocked? thanks meebo please email me .
September 12th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
kd o modo de bloqueio para o orkut ou msn?
October 30th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
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November 4th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
if I were to do it all over again I’d use Python’s asyncore or Twisted frameworks (lightweight HTTP server functionality with the expressiveness and interoperability of python/non-fugliness of C), paired with psyco (python optimizer) which would have probably cut development time by 80-90% with similar performance (and would have been *much* more maintainable.)
November 11th, 2006 at 3:45 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:45 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:46 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:47 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:48 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:49 am
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November 11th, 2006 at 3:49 am
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December 5th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
A quite intresting idea is realized in this website! And a good and easy to handle design has been found too!
December 5th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Very good and great site with very good look and perfect information…i like it
December 22nd, 2006 at 6:29 am
very good site…..
January 18th, 2007 at 11:24 am
hi every one
February 13th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Fantastic article covering some points I really needed some good usability info for.
March 19th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Great for this document i`m search many days in the world wide web,but now i found this information on your site.
Thanks for help,thats the answer of all my questions i`v had
Thanks again
Timo
March 20th, 2007 at 11:53 am
So how many concurrent connections are you doing per lighttpd server with this setup? How does that do against the old apache one?
March 31st, 2007 at 7:49 am
The informations are interesting. It´s better if you delete the spam in this blog.
April 8th, 2007 at 9:20 am
The informations are interesting
http://www.lenas-kochbuch.de
April 8th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Very good and great site
http://www.raeucherzeit.de
April 19th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
http://www.seositio.org/
May 5th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Very helpful article, thank you!
May 9th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Great and excellent article t’s realy helpful. Thanks again.
Wow. Very impressive.
June 16th, 2007 at 11:18 am
hey,people say they use the mmebo in communication even with calling mobile number.but i am findin that difficult.someone should please help me with these.loyalbankky@yahoo.com
July 6th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Thank you for your article. It realy help me.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Very helpful article, thank you!
December 28th, 2007 at 1:34 am
as for me very good
January 7th, 2008 at 1:30 am
I agree with SMS, I like reading the tech blogs, please delete the spam from them.
Meebo is really impressive.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:41 am
There are many useful informations in this article. Thanks and greetings from Thuringia!
January 14th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Greetings very interesting site !
Keep up the good work. Greetings
January 20th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Thanks for this very good article
February 5th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Good article. Very helpful. Thank you
February 11th, 2008 at 2:51 am
thx for the gerat stuff
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 am
Very helpful article
March 11th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I am an MBA and would like to start something on the software side. I am not a techy by myself but still have a flair towards it. If you have any plans to start any ventures in India do let me know. I found your group as an energetic and innovative one.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Super site this article help me a lot.thanks
April 17th, 2008 at 6:32 am
thx for the great stuff
April 17th, 2008 at 6:33 am
great article
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:00 am
Good article. Very helpful. Thank you. Keep up the good work.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:41 am
you have done a great job i kike very much meebo
sorry for my english
July 19th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
[...] due to some glowing reviews and reports that Wikipedia, Youtube and my favourite Meebo are using them. Well actually it was due to Apache1.3 giving me tons of core dumps error when paired with PHP5, [...]
August 4th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Hi webmaster!
August 6th, 2008 at 11:29 am
That’s the way…
August 14th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Hi webmaster!
August 17th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Thank you.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:25 am
i thank you very much for this article. it helped me very much.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Very good chair
December 18th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Funny how many people are called Ed Hardy
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Sometimes you need to send a free sms to be happy
Nice Text…
January 30th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Very good article.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Important site! This article helps us a lot. thanks
April 27th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful .. Amazing
May 17th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Very helpfull, thx.
May 29th, 2009 at 7:35 am
Thank you for the very informative post. Good stuff.
July 6th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Dropped in to show u some luv.,
August 9th, 2009 at 2:33 am
I think a desktop script or perhaps a site generated url/dynamic ip set could side step this in the long term. However, I’m not the uber-tech/coder I’m just a satisfied user, but I do miss my buddies and the job related advice they were able to relay meebo, so any solution, even temporary ones would be greatly appreciated.
October 17th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Hi I was wondering what theme your are using for your blog? Looks great.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Thanks for your good stuff. It is really nice.,
Ed Hardy
November 5th, 2009 at 7:50 am
That is really fantastics. As i am Oes i really like that flat form.
Oes Tsetnoc
November 19th, 2009 at 11:15 am
thats really wonderful. very easy to understand tutorial.