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May 5, 2008
The new MXNA (AXNA?)
First, I personally apologize for the downtime. We've been meaning to find MXNA a new home for quite a while now, and we finally decided to make the time to do it. Ironically, as we were working on moving the code over to the Adobe cluster, the old weblogs server went down in a big way. We're still not sure what happened, but for some reason, Java was core dumping a few minutes after starting JRun. Rather than spending too much time fixing the old server, we decided to look ahead, put up an "under construction" page, and focus on the new platform.
Mike Chambers and I wrote MXNA five years ago, thinking we would aggregate a few dozen popular blogs. 100 at the most. We initially put it on our own server which we expensed every month. When we outgrew that, we moved it to a single Macromedia server which Mike and I managed entirely ourselves. That worked out well for a couple of years until we outgrew it, as well. By that time, we were Adobe — a much larger company with more infrastructure — so moving it over to the cluster was a fairly involved task.
But we didn't just spread MXNA across a few more servers. As we began approaching 2,000 feeds, it became clear that the same code that managed 100 feeds wasn't doing such a good job managing 1,800. So I finally set aside a day, installed CF8, imported the production database, and with some pointers from Ben Forta (I'd never even used CF8 before — I've been focusing on AIR for the last two years), started optimizing.
I spent most of my time rewriting queries, and working on reducing the number of queries per request. The most dramatic change I made was optimizing the search query which went from about 30 seconds to one or two. Be sure to give it a try.
Again, sorry not just for the recent downtime, but for all the intermittent downtime over the last year or so. Hopefully we're past all that, and MXNA (AXNA?) will become a valuable community resource again.
Posted by cantrell at May 5, 2008 9:08 PM
Comments
Thanks for all your hard work on this it really looks awesome and works great.
ted :)
Posted by: Ted Patrick at May 5, 2008 9:16 PM
Christian,
Does it back up with old data and old feeds? I don't see mine in the list.
Blog URL is http://www.arckid.com/blog
Ashvin
Posted by: Ashvin Savani - Arckid at May 5, 2008 9:20 PM
Thanks, Ted!
Ashvin, all the old feeds should be there. If you don't see yours, please resubmit.
Thanks,
Christian
Posted by: Christian Cantrell at May 5, 2008 9:30 PM
@ Ashvin
It is in there (it was actually in there twice):
http://feeds.adobe.com/index.cfm?query=byFeed&feedId=5917&feedName=Ashvin%20Savani%20%2D%20Arckid
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
Posted by: mike chambers at May 5, 2008 9:44 PM
A definate performance and functionality boost. Well done! Have already "Dugg" it!
Posted by: Peter Tilbrook at May 5, 2008 9:59 PM
thankyou Christian for the hard work, both in the past with MXNA and recently getting it back again.
I've found MXNA to be vital in directing students and new developers/user group members to the Adobe community - a single entry point where they can start to climb onboard.
thanks for bringing my (and a lot of other people's) morning newspaper back online again.
Posted by: barry.b at May 5, 2008 11:13 PM
Much snappier. Dope!
Posted by: Chris Charlton at May 5, 2008 11:29 PM
Thanks guys for all the hard work. This is a huge service to the community.
Posted by: Jason Blum at May 6, 2008 4:01 AM
Hurrah, great news. MXNA has needed this love from Adobe for a while now - it is a great resource.
I see old feed URLs still work, which is dead handy too and guess the error on report graphs like http://feeds.adobe.com/reports/feedReport/index.cfm?feedId=5051&feedName=On%3A%20Flex will similarly be fixed given some time.
Posted by: Tom Chiverton at May 6, 2008 4:04 AM
Tom,
Yes, we will get the kinks worked out over the next few days.
Thanks,
Christian
Posted by: Christian Cantrell at May 6, 2008 5:29 AM
Great work! I know I love me my MXNA. Glad to see it back and better than ever! :)
Posted by: Tom Ortega at May 6, 2008 8:19 AM
Thanks for your hard work and for yours and Mike's initial concept. MXNA was one of the things that you appreciate more when it's not there. Being back more strong than ever it's a big thing for all of us maybe even bigger that a new release of a product and I'm glad that Adobe figured that. I'll just keep using the MXNA name just for the sake of "M"! ;)
Posted by: savvasmalamas at May 6, 2008 8:38 AM
The RSS feeds still say "Macromedia" instead of "Adobe"... just thought you might like to know.
Posted by: Richard Davies at May 6, 2008 10:17 AM
Nice work! Faster than ever now.....lots of posts to catch up on :)
Posted by: Dave at May 6, 2008 10:56 AM
I was very happy to see MXNA reborn when I went online this morning. Thank you!
Posted by: Brian Swartzfager at May 6, 2008 11:00 AM
Great to see it back! The feed title is still called 'Macromedia Latest News' perhaps this needs update as well :)
Posted by: Thijs Triemstra at May 6, 2008 11:00 AM
Congrats to you, Danny, Mike and team for getting this out the door...I remember when this was running on a laptop in your closet/workspace!
Posted by: Ben Watson at May 6, 2008 12:50 PM
But where in the world is john dowdell???
ott: thank you very much, guys. greatly appreciate it :)
Posted by: subhero at May 6, 2008 1:32 PM
You did it again, now even more cool!
I wonder do you plan to upgrade Adobe Feeds look-and-feel too (btw current design is great :)
Posted by: Rostislav Siryk at May 6, 2008 8:26 PM
Great news! MXNA has always been my starting point. Search function works like never before. Should we update our blogs link to new url?
Posted by: Flanture at May 7, 2008 6:16 AM
Flanture: Please do update your links. We have redirects in place, but of course it's always better to get the original URL right.
Rostislav: I would have loved to update the look and feel during this upgrade, but there wasn't time. Our hand was forced by the old server going down. Maybe that'll be next.
subhero: JD's blog should be back up now. We had to update several of the blogs, as well, now that CF is no longer running on the old weblogs machine.
Ben W: Good to hear from you! What're you up to these days?
Christian
Posted by: Christian Cantrell at May 7, 2008 10:05 AM
There is still some problem...
I get the following error quite often
Header Length too Large
The requested resource
/index.cfm
does not allow request data with GET requests, or the amount of data provided in the request exceeds the capacity limit.
I have to kill all browser instances and retstart after this .. else the problem persists
though it does reappear shortly
Thanks
Thiagu
Posted by: ALAGESAN THIAGARAJAN at May 8, 2008 6:24 AM