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About CIA.vc
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As you may have noticed, cia.vc hasn't exactly set records in reaction times and reliability lately (error 500, anyone?). I'm one of the folks currently working behind the schemes to keep things up and running.
You may also be aware that CIA's original author and maintainer, Micah Dowty, has been fairly quiet lately and isn't working on it as much as he used to.
To squash the rumors, I'd like to state that these two things are not related ;-)
I'm one of the people who jumped in to do maintenance and code work. Some may know me as "BearPerson" from the freenode network or from the Source Mage GNU/Linux distribution.
Anyway, I'm afraid I haven't had much time to spend on code and mostly did maintenance lately ("Is CIA down?" - "Unlikely, let me see... Ah, it's knee-deep in swapspace, let me clean that up...")
However, I plan to spend some time on the code, especially optimizing and removing a few "walls" we're hitting currently.
So while the situation right now isn't exactly ideal, it's being worked on, and I hope that Sometime Soon we'll have a CIA.vc that's nicely responsive again even when there's a bunch of load on the system.
What is the problem right now?
Well, in a nutshell, it's one of scale. We've grown. I count 3582 projects in the stats, or 6639 counting sub-projects. Whenever I see the web part causing high load, I can count on seeing several search engines' web crawlers in the http logs.
While we should be able to cope with the load (only a couple of commits on average per minute), there's a bit of trouble when a "backlog" of requests temporarily builds up in memory and we end up escaping to swapspace, slowing down request processing and building the backlog even further.
So, while throwing more hardware at the problem would push out the wall further, I'm going to focus my time on making things work on what we have right now. Because they should. I'm a programmer, not a sysadmin.
I guess that's it for now. Please bear with us as we live through the current bumps in the road :-) And in the meantime, feel free to come into #cia on freenode with suggestions and problem notices, I'll be there.