The Perils Of Success

LastGraph will be down for a few days while I sort out somewhere better for it to run. It's been using this servers' resources massively, and there's about 35GB of data now (over a gig of which is raw XML). The other sites on the server are suffering from the load, and we're down to Not Very Much diskspace.

I'll be relaunching with the new rewritten version, and automatic expiry of graph storage, to hopefully keep things more sane. If I can afford it, I may move to using something like Amazon S3 for storage, to avoid these issues.

In the meantime, please hang tight! You will be rewarded with your graphs soon enough (I plan to even spend my time on the coach down to London fixing this). If you're feeling generous, you may want to consider donating below; hopefully I can get enough funds to invest in more storage and processing power!

If you'd like to help with the costs of servers and storage, why not donate now?

Posted 20th September 2007 in Python, and LastGraph, with 13 comments

comments

  1. tito

    The day i discover LastGraph, the day it close :/
    Good luck for the next version :)

  2. Andrew Godwin

    Heh, hopefully it won't be down for long! I can't let people be without their graphs for too long...

  3. Anaethelion

    It only prove your idea is a great one! Keep it up! :D

  4. zdz

    Well, link to your site appeared at Planet GNOME today. Almost like slashdotted :)

  5. lix

    share the load!

  6. Andrew Godwin

    I'm trying to make sharing the load easier! The old system was too monolithic, so I'm trying to get it better...

  7. Aeracode ‘LastGraph’ / Last.fm

    [...] It’s a Django-based web-app based on what appears to be a school project by Lee Byron. Godwin took Byron’s idea, and webified it, allowing you to create custom ‘wavegraphs’ of your listening history.  The service is, unfortunately, down now due to overwhelming popularity, but Godwin says it should be back up soon. No Comments, Comment or Ping [...]

  8. Jon

    Hey, if you open up the source, people could run "mirrors" of a sort :)

  9. Thom Shannon

    You could use amazon EC2, release it as preconfigured AMI and let people run it themselves, then they can pay their own way. It's a great project by the way

  10. Andrew Godwin

    Yes, I do plan to release sources (and perhaps even an EC2 image) at some point, but that requires a website that doesn't run off of bits of string and sticky tape first.

    The old website was really quite hackish, and wasn't designed to be this scalable at all. This _is_ being remedied, I just hope I can do it without too much downtime. After that, it'll be a standard Django application and the rendernode client (which people may be more interested in hosting rather than a whole website client) should be around for people to run on those supercomputers they just have lying around.

    Think of it as something similar to Folding@Home, but without the benefit to humanity...

  11. Kevin

    @Andrew: Have you tried asking Last.FM if they would be willing to provide easy access to the service for their users by hosting the code similarly to their own image list charts? Anyway, nice work. I hope to get my own graphs once the new server is up and running.

  12. Andrew Godwin

    I haven't asked them that, no, although their servers are already pretty overworked and LastGraph is possibly one of the most intensive web services ever developed for general use.

    Better access to user history data would be nice, though, and I imagine it could be done a lot more efficiently if there was an API method for 'successive week charts combined' (and, indeed, weekly tag charts for tag graphs). I may see if that's possible.

  13. DanielJosphXhan

    Thankfully I downloaded the PDF and still have it on my Ubuntu box!


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