Hello community! We want to wish everyone a happy new year, as well as give you a small update on the status of Scalr development.
As some of you on this list know, when you get to tens of thousands of instances managed by Scalr, some processes become a bottleneck to scale. Starting with 4.1, Scalr will require an additional component for installation (previous ones were mysql, cron, and scalr itself). This component is Gearman, and it will handle all message processing, and reduce Scalr message processing overhead from minutes to seconds (this means servers will initialize faster). It works as follows: when Scalr needs to send a message to the managed server, it stores this message in a database. Previously, every minute a cron job would read messages and process them in 20 threads. Now with Gearman, we have an always-running daemon which processes messages immediately, upon receipt. We currently use 75 threads Gearman threads on the Scalr.net service, and our larger users can easily scale this to hundreds or thousands of threads. Happy scaling, Sebastian -- Follow us: Twitter <https://twitter.com/#!/scalr> - Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/Scalr> - Blog <http://blog.scalr.net/> --
