Philly Future is almost back

Hello,

Quick update: Due to issues at the previous host that kept me from gaining the access I needed to diagnose the performance issues Philly Future was suffering, I have migrated Philly Future to a new host. This enabled me to determine that the blog aggregator, The Philly Wire, was the root cause of Philly Future's instability.

I will be upgrading Philly Future to the next major Drupal release to see if this resolves the issue. Going from Drupal 5.x to 6.0 involves major work since the templates that Philly Future employs need to be redone to be compatible. Finding uninterrupted to to accomplish this will be a challenge.

It is possible that this will not resolve the issue since it appears it to be one of sheer growth. The aggregator has grown to a size that a Drupal on any under $100 hosting solution cannot satisfy.

Installing memcached should help as a next step, which I will take, however, the smart, cost effective solution is to go distributed - to host Philly Future's aggregator process on Amazon web services or Google's App Engine. Incur the CPU and memory cost there, and consume the results of that processing here. More than likely, that will be the next phase of rebuilding Philly Future. If and when Philly Future goes this route I plan to document the process for others, and to hopefully build a solution that can be used by others who would like to build similar services.

I'd like to apologize for the issues Philly Future has been experiencing. Attempting to resolve them part-time, in fits and starts, the way I have has been largely unsuccessful.

So it is long past time I do this and practice what I preach - please join me at this google group to start an open conversation about Philly Future's management and its future.

Thank you,

Karl