I figured you guys were under fire. Glad to hear you are on the other side of that. I am still on and sticking with iris and probably will use cloudant too eventually. I hope my questions didn't cause any issues, just had to launch 6 months of work and I myself am under that support load as we speak. Looking forward to the premium service when you guys get to it.
Also, anything I can do to help, let me know. We are a lot better at design than development. Jeff Charette | Principal We Are Charette web / identity / packaging m 415.298.2707 w wearecharette.com e [email protected] On Mar 12, 2013, at 8:21 PM, Jason Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:01 AM, Jeff Charette <[email protected]> wrote: > >> What is your CouchDB host preference? Here has been my experience which >> leaves me as a loss for hosted services. >> >> Cloudant >> - doesn't support newest couch techniques like require and I can't find a >> tutorial to port my couch app. >> >> Iriscouch (currently using) >> - I have nothing but love for these guys, but have had a lot of issues >> lately. I've requested an upgrade with no response unfortunetly. >> - they are on 1.2.1 which would be great, but 1.2.1 has a big issue which >> has been fixed for 1.2.2 >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1651 > > > Thanks for your love. Regarding Iris Couch, I am biased; but I myself have > nothing but love for the people at Cloudant, too. Of course, ultimately, > you don't need people, you need the stuff they make and do (i.e. CouchDB > service). > > You are right that we have had issues lately. We've always had random > failures; but this is the first time things have gotten bad enough that > general users felt prolonged slowness or unavailability. > > Long story short: these issues are behind us and we are back to our > well-known quality of service. > > I thought our failure would be a boring story, but maybe I'll tell it > anyway. > > The big problem was that we failed to support people, not that we failed to > run software. Do you know how lots of stuff runs just fine from 0% to about > 90% or 95% capacity, then it collapses horribly (e.g. memory, filesystems, > disk i/o)? We experienced a similar collapse with customer support. > > The past two weeks, due to vacations and traveling engineers, we were doing > less regular maintenance than usual. Then, also randomly, a few machines > crashed badly. As a sysadmin I like CouchDB, because only safe operations > are allowed. (For example, CouchDB has no JOINs, therefore every read > operation is guaranteed to complete in logarithmic time.) That is usually > the situation; however there is still the occasional memory leak or out of > control process or whatever. Anyway, we exhausted memory on several > machines which crashed many people's couches. > > That's fine; but the real collapse happened when everybody began to inquire > about their server. Fixing stuff over SSH is quick, but supporting people > takes much more time. When we saw the support volume spike, I decided to > enter triage mode: make a priority list of technical and personal > obligations and work from the top down. > > All software has real-time constraints. In fact, all human activity has > real-time constraints. Right? Right? Hello? Hello! Can you hear me? After a > certain time, if something is not done, it may as well never be done. That > is how I approached our support load. > > I have learned from many trusted advisors (Hi, Jan and Noah and everyone!) > that "support load" is a terrible phrase. CPU load is CPU load; but > "support load" is people. So, I have learned my lesson, and we are now > working through the entire backlog. Some people emailed to tell us > nevermind, they had moved to Cloudant. I think they wanted to twist the > knife a bit, to blow off steam. Okay, but that put them near the bottom of > our priority list (they are no longer using the service; outstanding issues > are moot). However they are still people. We will be emailing even them, to > say the issue has been resolved. If you ask a question, I should respond, > otherwise it's rude. > > -- > Iris Couch
