Jay Paroline

One of the exciting features coming to Grooveshark 2.0 (yes, VIP only at first) starting on the 24th is client-side caching.

What does that mean?
We are finally taking advantage of the fact that because we use flash, we have a stateful application capable of remembering even dynamic data. In other words, if the client already knows something, it doesn’t have to ask the server again.

For our users this is exciting because navigating back and forth on pages they have already seen should be almost instantaneous. For the backend it’s exciting because the client now acts as another layer of cache in front of the database, and can keep data in memory even when it must be flushed from memcache. Example:
When a user edits their playlist, that data is deleted from memcache (not overwritten due to potential race conditions). The next time that playlist data is requested, it must be loaded from the database. In 2.0, the chances of the client asking for that playlist data again are very slim, because in most cases it will remain in memory, so we should still be saved a round trip to the database in most cases.

In the slightly longer term (before Grooveshark 2.0 is available to the public), we will be taking advantage of Flash LSOs to even remember certain data between reloads, so things like browsing your library will be lightning fast and won’t require loading data from the server at all, unless you changed your library from another computer.

Client-side caching is just one of the many ways in which we are working to improve the user experience while hopefully reducing load on our servers, and I will be posting more details over the next few days, so stay tuned.

So far the VIP launch has been a resounding success, but as I mentioned previously, the real gravy for VIP users is yet to come: the ability to try out 2.0 first.

The official date that 2.0 becomes available for VIP users is the 24th. Here’s some of what they have to look forward to:

Choose from cool themes. My favorite is Greenify.

Here you can see the home screen, redesigned player and brand new sidebar in action. You’ll notice the little dot on the player. Yes, you can click and drag that to skip ahead and back while a song is playing (finally)!

Lists of songs are redesigned to be faster and more usable at the same time. No more slidey panels and awkward navigation heirarchies! Also notice that in 2.0 you can favorite artists and albums in addition to songs.

Grooveshark has launched VIP subscriptions.

Sign up for $3/month or $30/year.
In exchange you get:
-No ads ever (and more screen real estate because of it)
-Access to the latest and greatest features before anyone else.
-More to be announced later
-Locked in at the low rate. If the price goes up, your cost doesn’t.
-A badge next to your name that says you’re VIP.

On the 24th we will be launching a beta version of 2.0 to our VIP users, and trust me, that’s where the real value lies.

Coverage:
Grooveshark Launches Subscription VIP Service

Coverage:

We’ve been very hard at work here at Grooveshark, working on version 2.0, *and* a new feature that will allow some users to use the site without seeing ads, ever, and the opportunity to try version 2.0 before anyone else.

I can’t say exactly when it will be, but expect more updates soon.

Grooveshark surpassed the 500,000 registered user mark today.
Ignoring the fact that many of our users never bother to register (it’s not necessary in order to use the site), 500k is an absolutely phenomenal number, especially compared to where we were just a year ago: 33k. The scary thing is that under our current growth rate, we will have over a million registered users in roughly 3 months.

Can we double our capacity in just 3 months? Obviously, history implies that it’s possible; we’ve already done much more than that. In fact we’ve done better than that: with little change in infrastructure and much of the same server capacity we’ve managed to make Grooveshark faster and scale at the same time.

On the other hand, much of the low-hanging scalability fruit has been picked now. We use memcached extensively, use a master/slave DB configuration with a data warehouse for logging or writes that don’t need to be processed in real time, and have begun doing some rudimentary sharding for stream-related activities.

What’s left? Well, we aren’t yet at the point where we can scale linearly simply by adding more servers, except probably for streaming servers. For that we need more sharding, primarily. There are still some SQL optimizations that can be made, like bringing session ids down to 16 bytes from 32 (32 on disk and 96 in memory, thanks to utf8) and ultimately getting them out of the database altogether, and using memcached even more heavily, but really all of those things only buy us time. Not that there is anything wrong with buying time, because we also need time to work on new features like last.fm scrobbling, a super-secret redesign, launching on half a dozen mobile platforms, etc., all with a relatively small dev team, but ultimately there are some fundamental architecture changes coming, and if we’re going to keep doubling our number of users every 3 months, it’s going to have to be very soon.

Update: A lot of people have been looking at this post as evidence that we are working on scrobbling support. I should point out that scrobbling support now exists for VIP users: Enable it here.

It’s no secret that I am deeply entrenched in the back-end world. I can optimize the hell out of some queries, and write some pretty complex php, but when it comes to html, css and javascript, I am a barbarian. In fact, I stopped learning about html in the 90’s, before css and back when javascript was pretty useless. I just don’t care for working on visual stuff, especially if it’s going to be finicky and inconsistent on different platforms.

Anyway, a longstanding complaint I’ve had when using Tinysong is that I can’t listen to a song before I share it. How do I make sure it’s the song I’m thinking of? Sure, I could copy the URL and paste it in the location bar and load up lite, but by then my other song options are gone, not to mention that I’m lazy.

I finally decided to take a stab at adding playback to Tinysong myself, and I’m happy to report that everything seems to be working quite well. I can’t take credit for the whole thing, or even most of it. Katy wrote the streaming code, and Chanel made some beautiful javascript wrappers for the whole thing, both for other projects. I simply took what they did and wrote the css and javascript to glue it to Tinysong. I’m happy to report that it seems to be working quite well, and I hope I’m not the only one who appreciates this enhancement. Give it a try and let me know what you think.