BookMooch Blog

Last sunday, I took the overnight boat from Stockholm to Helsinki. I’m chairman of the board of a new company called Star Wreck Studios and had several days of meetings in Helsinki (trying to get SWS funding and company and tech meetings too).

In the middle of all these meetings, BookMooch crashed, so I said to myself “the hell with it, since the old technology just crashed and I finished the new one a few days ago (and it seems to work) I should just try the new stuff and see if I got it right.”

So, as of this past tuesday, BookMooch has been running on the new technology that I’ve been working furiously on the past few weeks, aka “the reason I came to Stockholm”.

All was working well for several days, and I had 3 days scheduled with the Star Wreck crew at a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, Finland. Of course, while I was at my log cabin, BookMooch crashed. My new sysadmin showed great initiative, and set up BookMooch to stop and restart every time it got slow, which normally would be fine, but for BookMooch, and the way it was designed, was actually the worst thing to do. I’m not mad at him: he showed great initiative and I should have warned him not to do this.

At any rate, what this meant is that for two days, BookMooch was getting stopped and restarted repeatedly, which caused member accounts to become invalid, if they were doing something to their account the second BookMooch was restarting.

So, if you can’t log into BookMooch, send a tech support request in at http://bookmooch.com/about/email_support and give your login name. I’ll fix your account by hand.

The good news is that BookMooch is now much, much faster, and the 20 second delays should be a thing of the past.

However, just as soon as I made BookMooch faster, all you eager moochers started using the BookMooch web site a *lot* more, actually 2.5x more than ever before, thus slowing it down a bit.

Now it turns out that what is keeping BookMooch from being insanely fast all the time (and it’s pretty fast now, most of the time) is fetching data from the database. If I put more memory on the computer, I’ll be able to increase the speed that BookMooch runs, by quite a bit.

In a few days, I will have a new 64bit server, with 8gb of RAM, running a 64 bit version of Linux, and I’ll be testing the BookMooch software on that machine. Once I think it’s reliable, BookMooch will switch over to using this 64bit server, and hopefully will be soo fast that it can deal with 28% month-to-month growth for a while.

And because “that’s just how life is”, I was drinking champagne on the boat back from Helsinki, to de-stress about the database mess that was waiting for me when I got back. Somehow I managed to hit my laptop with my knee, propel it 2ft on a table into a glass of champagne, and destroy my main laptop. Sigh.

My friend Ramsay, who is living with me in Stockholm (writing a book) is letting me use his laptop for now. My other friend Derek (who runs CDBABY) is living at my house in London, and fedexing me my older 12″ laptop to my apartment here in Stockholm. All very exiciting, but talk about bad timing: I had to blow up my laptop just as I really needed it to fix the database problems. Thank goodness for generous friends, or else I’d be on an airplane back to London right now, to fix the mess.

So that’s the state of things.

-john, in Stockholm

I’m on a 5 week retreat in Stockholm, Sweden from August 1 to September 4, doing nothing but programming on BookMooch.

Specifically, I am working on fixing the slowness that has been creeping up on the BookMooch web site, making it really painful to use at times. It’s a really big project to fix, which is why I’m hiding away from everyone while I work on this, putting in 12h days and only going out for meals. I should be able to fix the problem by the end of the month, and hopefully BookMooch will stay fast for a while after that.

The cause of the speed problem is simply BookMooch’s 28% month-to-month growth. I am rewriting the database layer, and the database driver, from scratch, in a programming language called C. My initial tests show a 75x speedup with the new way I’m doing things, which should be enough for a while.

I’m renting a two bedroom apartment in Gamla Stan, which is the center island, and the oldest part of Stockholm. I’m here with my author friend Ramsay Wood, who is doing a 2nd volume of his book of fables.

However, I do get out for two walks a day, for meals, and you can keep up with my adventures by reading my wife’s blog.