Let’s make this ultra flexible, Just in Case someone wants to do x, y and z.
Let’s split this into a new library, Just in Case we need it elsewhere.
Let’s optimize this piece of code, Just in Case it’s too slow.

They’re really going to want a, b or c (not x, y and z).
It’s easy to create that new library later, when you know you need it.
A profiler will tell you what parts are slow.

If all the Just in Cases were saved until Just in Time… there would be time to refactor, there would be time to do more testing and the code would be more maintainable.

You should think about the Just in Cases, but don’t implement them yet… (unless it has to do with testing).

I looked at a few options, but ended up going for ec2. It gave me more familiarity and flexibility than app engine, has better pricing than dedicated hosting, and has a good community knowledge base.

I needed to run MySQL [1,2], python2.6, tornado, nginx (as a front end load balancer) and some cron jobs. I don’t need much horsepower, so I decided to try the micro instance (~$14/month). I got everything setup and ran it in test for a couple weeks. Everything worked great. The average request was 3X faster than the shared hosting environment.

Everything looked awesome, so on Feb 5 I moved it all over. The micro instance performed wonderfully… , for a few hours, then it didn’t. It was still working, everything was up, but it was very slow, and my cpu was at 99%. I spent hours looking at all my logs and tweaking indexes, but I couldn’t figure it out. It would run fast for awhile, and then it would slow wayyyy down. Requests were taking 60X longer than normal.

Then I re-read amazon’s description of the Micro Instance.

Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

I moved everything from the Micro Instance to a Small Instance. This fixed everything. Apparently I was experiencing the burst speed on the micro instance for the duration of my testing. It wasn’t until I put some real load on it that it switched out of turbo mode. Luckily the upgrade from Micro to Small only took about 10 minutes. Since MySQL is using the Elastic Block Storage, I just attached the EBS volume to the new instance all my data was there.

So, if you’re considering moving to a micro instance, makes sure to do some load testing before making the final decision. Ec2 is amazing, the transition has been very smooth other than that.

I’ve also made a few changes to the website’s style.

1. I moved to the latest version of EditArea. Looks like it actually took a small regression in chrome, I’ll look into fixing that.
2. Smaller urls, collabedit.com/display?id=123456 becomes collabedit.com/123456. The old urls will redirect to the new one.
3. 4 spaces instead of tabs for indentation.
4. Word wrap.
5. Fixed 5 minute timeout issue.

Prior to this feature, if you accidentally wiped out your document text it was gone for good. This is no longer a problem.

Older documents won’t have any history yet, because it hasn’t been tracked until now.

1. User List – See a list of everyone who is currently viewing the document

2. Improved latency – The code no longer polls every 2 seconds to check for document changes. Instead it uses comet so it’s updated instantly.

I also fixed an issue with opera, improved the error dialog and made some changes to the underlying code.

I’ve switched to using Tornado as the underlying web server. Tornado will enable me to use comet (aka “long polling”, “server-push”, “http-streaming”, “bosh”) technology.  I haven’t taken full advantage of that yet, but I will. Tornado also has a built in templating system, authentication, database helpers and a few other nice features.

With this in mind I have decided to spend my time on something else for now. I will leave eclocking up, and I will continue to use it myself.

When I learned that google had acquired etherpad earlier this week I had mixed feelings. I’m going to miss the service it provided, but I see an opportunity for collabedit to fill the void left by etherpad. I have been looking for another side project, but hadn’t considered revisiting collabedit until now.

I recognize that collabedit lacks many of the features that make a collaborative editor like this useful. I intend to spend time over the next several months adding these features. I would appreciate any feedback from etherpad users about what features would be the most useful. For this purpose I have created a new feedback forum at http://collabedit.uservoice.com.

Congratulations to the etherpad team, you deserve all the success you’ve seen. Best of luck with Google Wave!