#monitech

This short documentary film was made in August 2012 by Lidia, using footage from an iPhone 4s.

Click on the link to see what we have created, we're very exited about it!

After some time passed we observed some weird load behavior. I noticed high load spikes at regular intervals. This caused a rather high average load on our production server. The reason was determined: the dog piling effect.  We use nginx and gunicorn in our production as we have too few workers to benefit from having multiple cores. As I mentioned, the cache expires quite fast (in a few seconds) because the cab data is constantly changing, so there is no need to generate it on every query (so really, using cache is not a bad idea). 

Basically Monitech is a great team of electronic engineers and programmers who are also scientists and professionals. When you get right down to it, you could really call them wizards! Why wizards? I hope you can find the answer to this question yourself by following our blog. We provide innovative, unique, interesting and at times even cosmic ideas that drive us and our work. Immodestly, but honestly, I'll also tell you  that this is where we want to show off our projects and achievements, to inspire people to action and to be innovative! To encourage openness to new technologies and to abandon the fear of their implementation. Share your opinion and suggestions with our team! Have fun!

Since the very beginning we encountered problems with high loads on our production server. Surprisingly most of the bottlenecks causing our load issues were located in seemingly unimportant parts of the project. This taught me one important lesson: never leave things in your project that you don't want to be used. History has shown that users always find those hidden “features” (e.g. views made only for inspection/debug) more attractive than the features designed to perfectly fit their needs. One of those "not so well" designed parts of our app was a page showing a map with all cabs, their statuses, drivers etc. The map is generated by Targeo and uses our RESTful API to get all the data by making Ajax queries. The thing which killed our app on the first day lay just behind this API. In most critical moments we reached load average of something like 40. It was nearly impossible to log in to the production server to inspect the problem.  The issue had a couple main causes: * A time consuming database query  * A general lack of caching  Obviously we immediately tweaked our query but the thing which proved to be real cure was the cache. Now we use memcached as our cache back end. This solution has worked well for a few months. It instantly reduced the load average to something below 0.1 on our production server. Eventually, it turned out that simply applying cache is not enough in our case. But I will write more about that next time ...

As you may have noticed, these days there is more and more spam and ads being sent via social media. Most people find this tactic irritating, myself included. I personally believe in creating a good and honest relationship and establishing the right type of communication with the public. When the company, brand or product have that. or at least have of plan of how to do it, they may think about spreading it via social media. Otherwise a Facebook presence won’t help. New media is an opportunity for more direct communication with the public and building a relation which we really want…But like in everything, we need to think before taking action.

Here we are - The Dream Team of Monitech, and we have a lot to talk about in many fields, so we would like to make it easier for you to identify the subject and creator of every post. That's why at the beginning of each post you might see the face of it's author. :)