Over the years you have probably have seen him pop up in Apple promotional videos…or heard his music in Monster, Stealth or even The Fast And The Furious.

I’m excited to announce now that we’ve completed the massive overhaul of our backend infrastructure that makes Apture not only more stable, but faster as well. We apologize for any slowdowns you may have experienced last week, but a lot of testing was needed to ensure things went smoothly. If you are interested technically in what we did the blog post is here. In the process of examining the code we actually were able to add a few new bells and whistles to Apture.

1. Wikipedia
We did some retooling on the backend and came up with a way to cache all of Wikipedia. What it means to you is when you link to a Wikipedia document it should load nearly instantly. Speed gains on some of the larger articles with this overhaul are near 50x

2. Scribd/PDF Document handling
Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking with many users and noticed they were having trouble with Scribd documents loading slowly or not loading at all. It turns out Scribd had some larger bugs in their API that we helped them fix. 99% of the documents should load properly and a few remaining bugs Scribd promised us they would fix in their next software release. Please let us know if you see any remaining Scribd related issues so we can help track them down.

3. New Animations Results now open in a way that we feel visually communicates what is happening when an Apture link is clicked. We think this will result in users clicking on more of the links you take the time to make. Send us your feedback simply by replying to this email. You can view a brief video of it here .

We appreciate your patience last week and hope you enjoy the improvements we’ve made. As always, if you have any feedback or are having any issues using Apture please feel free to reach out to me so we can look into it right away.

Also we are working on the NEXT version of Apture. Its very different and we’d love to show you an early version of it. Simply send an email to drew @ apture dot com with your site url and we’ll look into getting you set-up.

Andrew Machado
Community Manager
www.facebook.com/apture

Enough about me, let’s talk about Apture.com; as I said, some of you might have noticed intermittent problems over the past couple weeks, problems which I feel confident saying are now behind us. Over the past couple weeks Can (read: Jon) and I have worked with Contegix to perform some pretty serious hardware upgrades to the cluster of machines running Apture.com. In addition to hardware upgrades, Can and I have also rolled out a number of software changes not only to service incoming requests faster but to service them reliably even in times of high-stress on the production machines.

Warning: It’s about to get technical.

Apture’s entire code base is written in Python, for a number of reasons I won’t go into here, being a Python-shop our web application is developed with Django at its core. This has a couple of implications, both positive and negative, from a technical standpoint. Django allows us to worry less about the “menial tasks” of building web applications, as with most web frameworks, we can take advantage of all the man hours that have gone into making Django a solid application framework and focus on what is unique about Apture. There are a couple of downsides to using Django for such a large application (both traffic and lines-of-code) like Apture; there’s some assumed level of “magic” going on underneath the covers, while Django tries to be as close to “one size fits all” there are certainly some portions that need tweaking as your application grows, particularly in the ORM and database-access layer. We’ve tried to partition some of our database access across multiple database machines but the unfortunate state of affairs is that we are still beholden to a single primary database machine for a lot of our operations (similar to the Twitter of 2007). This singular DB machine was the root cause for a number of our issues over the past few weeks.As we dug into our analysis across a couple of days, we noticed that the DB machine was particularly write-bound, Apture.com was getting so much updated data that the DB machine could not stream writes to its disks fast enough. This would then cause issues “downstream” so to speak, with application servers backing up waiting for their INSERT and UPDATE statements to complete causing cascading waves of overloaded machines, always originating from the primary DB machine.

Up until a couple of weeks ago we were using a standard Apache + mod_python set up for running the web application. When the primary DB machine would start to back up,causing requests in Apache to wait, we would notice the load on the machine would spike in catastrophic fashions, 4-core machines where a 4.0 load average is generally assumed “100% load”would spike into triple digits. What this meant for end-users was a brief period of 500 errors and connection resets as the wave of overload swept through the web servers.

The wave would also affect our work queue (Kestrel) which would all of a sudden back up to the tune of hundreds of thousands of jobs while asynchronous workers would wait patiently for their database writes to complete. The queue backing up also had the effect of prolonging our overload issues, as the DB would start to clear up, all of a sudden the thousands of jobs that were patiently waiting in the queue would start streaming through, which could in turn put enough load on the DB that it would start the cycle all over again!

A wise man once said:

“I do mind, the Dude minds. This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.”

We got to work correcting a number of deficiencies in our infrastructure. First, we replaced more than half our Apache instances with “Spawning“, a high performance Python-specific web server capable of handling an incredible number of concurrent requests. Spawning performed so well, we updated our load balancer configuration to prefer Spawning to Apache at a 2:1 ratio. We also corrected some of our flow issues with the work queue, making sure that jobs are not constantly backing up but also that we’re not evacuating the queue too quickly, thereby overwhelming the primary DB machine. While we were rooting around in the production infrastructure we also upgraded our memcached capacity by five fold, giving ourselves a vast amount of memory reserved for more and more caching in front of the databases. Lastly, we added more hardware to better federate critical services, the highlight being brand new beefy database machine. Working with Contegix we built a machine with much higher disk throughput and more processing power than its predecessor, switching our primary database over to the new machine last Thursday night (with ~2 minutes of downtime).

As it stands now, we’re continuing to make a number of infrastructure improvements to not only make Apture more reliable but faster. There are some changes that I’m working on currently to help improve the speed at which our users can access content and interact with Apture-enabled sites.

I think I can speak for the whole Apture team when I say, I appreciate your patience with us over the past couple weeks, we’re all hard at work constantly making Apture better every single day.

What is Auto Enhance?

Auto Enhance is the quickest way to use Apture on your site.  You simply check one box when either registering or if you already have Apture simply Login.

Once enabled outbound links to popular sites are automatically enhanced with Apture so your readers can view the contents of the outbound link without leaving your site.  You have to do zero additional effort while writing your posts for this feature to work and you get all of the SEO benefit of outbound links.

What Can Auto Enhance Do For You?

Instead of your users leaving your site when you link to an article about Seal, they can simply view it right on your site.

Maybe you wanted to link your user to the Twitter Stream of Chris Johnson, the best running back in the National Football League.

Or better yet you saw a great commercial the other night for Avatar and wanted your reader’s to see it without having to embed the video on your blog.

What Content can Apture Auto Enhance?

Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Hulu, Scribd and many others.

Find out how to Enable Auto Enhance here or if you do not have Apture installed on your blog we can solve that.

But you can add in additional content from your own YouTube Channel, Glam videos and even MTV.

Video of how to add and remove additional Video Providers within Apture

Send us your thoughts or shoot us a message on Twitter.

]]> http://blog.apture.com/2009/11/a-new-look-for-apture/feed/ 4 http://blog.apture.com/2009/11/a-new-look-for-apture/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAptureBlog/~3/nU0R9u5Zmk4/ http://blog.apture.com/2009/11/put-any-youtube-channel-on-your-blog/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:30:35 +0000 Andrew Machado http://blog.apture.com/?p=2690 We’ve written previously about how you can store your YouTube Channel inside Apture for quick linking to previous videos you have made. Well now you can embed ANY YouTube channel on your blog that dynamically updates as you add movies!

This feature is designed to not only let your users quickly browse through your entire movie collection, but to do it in a way that keep them on your site rather than going to YouTube.

BMW

How To Build Your YouTube Channel Widget

1. Simply open Apture on your blog or visit www.apture.com/builder and paste in the url to your YouTube Channel.

2.  For this example we will use the Apture YouTube channel located www.youtube.com/aptureinc

3.  After clicking the Go button Apture will automatically detect your feed and built your widget.  Click Create Embed and you are finished.

4.  Embed on Your Blog if you built it with www.apture.com/create

But What If I Want the Widget to be bigger?

1.  After you have have pasted in your channel ID and hit Go you will notice a small pull down menu called Show Preview & Options.  Select Content Size from this list.

2.  Pick the Height and Width you would like for your Apture Channel Widget and hit the Create Embed button.

Video Sources with Native Support In Apture.

blip.tv
Clip Syndicate
Comedy Central
Current Video
DailyMotion Video
ESPN

Facebook
Google Video
Hulu
MTV
Qik
RedLasso
Reuters
Revver
Veoh
VH1
Vimeo
Viddler
YouTube
YouTube channels (Find out how to plug your channel right into Apture)

Keep in mind these aren’t all the formats that Apture natively supports.  We support many embed codes and if you run into one that is not working properly within Apture please send us an note on Twitter.

We are Adding the ability to Store Your Amazon Tracking ID for Future Use

Simply Visit Apture’s User Page, select Edit Settings and click on the Monetize Tab to store your Amazon Tracking ID.  By doing this we will automatically store your Amazon ID with every Amazon link you make.  This means when you are reviewing Headphones, mentioning CDs you love or simply promoting your favorite Electronics you can get paid when viewers of your blog click the links.

How Do You Store your Amazon Tracking ID?

1.  Visit Apture.com and Log In.

2.  Click on the Edit Settings

3.  Select the Monetize Menu Item

4.  Input your Tracking ID and Click Save

5.  Make an Apture Link and select an Amazon item. You will see a small notice confirming your Id is attached.

Send us any thoughts you have on this feature via Twitter

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