Jay Paroline

Thanks to Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash post, there’s been a whole new flurry of posts on the subject of flash vs html5, this time with some focus on the issue of openness, since Steve made such a point to bring that up.

Some people have already pointed out that Adobe has been moving Flash to be more and more open over time, including the open screen project, contributing tamarin to Mozilla, and Flex being completely open source. That’s all well and good, but people seem to be forgetting that historically, Flash had a very good reason for being closed. If one remembers back to the early days of the web, the wild west era as I do since it was such an exciting time for a young whippersnapper like me, one must only think back to what happened to Java to realize why making Flash closed was a very smart move.

For those who don’t remember or weren’t on the web back then, I’ll share what I remember which may be a bit off (that was quite a while ago now!). I’m talking about the hairy days when Netscape was revolutionizing the world and threatening to make desktop operating systems irrelevant and Microsoft was playing catch up. Java was an open and exciting platform to write once and run anywhere, promising to make proprietary operating systems even more irrelevant.

Of course, what ended up happening was that Microsoft created their own implementation of Java that not only failed to completely follow the Java spec, but added on some proprietary extensions, completely breaking the “write once, run anywhere” paradigm and helping to marginalize Java on the web, something it seems Java on the web has never fully recovered from, even though Microsoft has since settled with Sun and dropped their custom JVM after being sued.

This directly affected my personal experience with the language, when I took a Java class at the local community college while I was in high school. I wanted to write apps for the web, but even basic apps which compiled and ran fine locally would not work on IE, Netscape or both, the only solution being to spend hours fiddling and making custom versions for each browser. Needless to say, I quickly lost interest and haven’t really touched Java since I finished that class.

The atmosphere has certainly changed since those early days, and I don’t think it’s nearly as dangerous to “go open” now as it was back then, so Adobe’s choice to open up more and more of the platform now makes perfect sense, just as the decision to keep it closed until relatively recently also made sense.

The saga continues. Today while checking up on one of our servers, I noticed that it’s load average was insanely low. It’s one of our “biggest” servers, so it typically deals with a large percentage of our traffic. Load averages over 10 are quite normal, and it was seeing a load average of 2-3.

[email protected]:~# tail /var/log/messages
Apr 28 10:59:56 RHL039 kernel: printk: 9445 messages suppressed.
Apr 28 10:59:56 RHL039 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.
Apr 28 11:00:01 RHL039 kernel: printk: 9756 messages suppressed.
Apr 28 11:00:01 RHL039 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.
Apr 28 11:00:06 RHL039 kernel: printk: 6111 messages suppressed.
Apr 28 11:00:06 RHL039 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.
Apr 28 11:00:11 RHL039 kernel: printk: 3900 messages suppressed.
Apr 28 11:00:11 RHL039 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.
Apr 28 11:00:16 RHL039 kernel: printk: 2063 messages suppressed.
Apr 28 11:00:16 RHL039 kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.

[email protected]:~# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max
800000
ro[email protected]:~# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_count
799995


When the server drops packets like this, things seem randomly and intermittently broken, so we apologize for that. I upped the limit (again) to get things working, but we still don’t know why so many connections are being held open in the first place.

Grooveshark is in the middle of some major unplanned downtime right now, after having major server issues just about all day.

What’s going on? We don’t fully know, but we have some clues.

-We are fairly certain that our load balancer is running well over capacity, and we’ve had a new one on order for a little while already.

-Some time this morning, one of our servers broke. Not only did it break, but our alerts that tell us about our servers were also broken due to a misconfiguration (but only for that server).

-Today near peak time, our two biggest servers stopped getting any web traffic except for very short bursts of very tiny amounts of traffic. At the same time, our other servers started seeing insane load averages. /var/log/messages showed warnings about dropping packets because of conntrack limits. The limits were the same as other boxes that had been doing just fine, and in normal circumstances we never come close to those limits, but the counters showed we were definitely hitting those limits and keeping them pegged.

-After upping the limits to even ridiculously higher numbers, the servers started getting web traffic again, and the other servers saw their load averages return to sane values. The connection counts were hovering somewhat close to the new limits, but seemingly with enough margin that they were never hitting the new limits; good enough for a temporary solution.

-Things were seemingly stable for a couple of hours, but connection numbers were still weird. One of our server techs who really is awesome at what he does but shall remain nameless here for his own protection, was investigating the issue and noticed a configuration issue on the load balancer that might have been causing the weird traffic patterns and definitely needed to be fixed. Once it was late enough, we decided to restart the load balancer to apply the settings, a disruption of service that would bring the site down for a minute or so under normal circumstances, well worth it for the chance of having things behave tomorrow.

-Obviously, things did not go quite as planned. The load balancer decided not to come back up, leaving us with the only option of sending a tech out to the data center 1.5 hours away to resurrect the thing.

Update 4/23/2010 11:50am:
Well obviously Grooveshark is back up and running. Total downtime was 2-3 hours, and we have a slightly better picture of what some of the problems were. The load balancer itself wasn’t exactly the problem, it was actually the interaction between the load balancer and the new core switch we installed last weekend. When the load balancer restarted, the switch got confused and essentially got a false alarm on the routing equivalent of an infinite loop, so it cut off the port, making the load balancer completely inaccessible. We now have it set up so that we can still connect to it even if the switch cuts it off, but we also figured out how to work around that issue if it happens again.
There’s still some weird voodoo going on with the servers that we haven’t fully explained, so be prepared for more slowness today while we continue to look into it.

Just a quick note to point out a cool little utility I discovered recently even though it’s been around for a while:

memcache.php stats like apc.php

If you are at all familiar with the apc status page, you know its nothing fancy but it is a very usable way to gett a quick overview of what is going on, and much prettier than the cli options.

Here is a screenshot from the author’s post:

It literally requires virtually no setup, it’s quite amazing. Optionally change the user/pass combo and add info about your buckets to an array, and boom you’re done. This let’s you easily see how much memory a bucket is using, and you can even see the contents of a slab. It does have one very dangerous feature that I’m tempted to strip out entirely: the ability to flush the contents of a bucket, seemingly with the click of a mouse (I haven’t tested it to find out). Some things should be hard.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking it out, it takes virtually no time and might actually be useful!

Alternate title: Why is the flag for Spanish the Mexican flag?

As you have probably already noticed, Grooveshark is translated into a couple of different languages now. The language selection dropdown contains the name of the language (in that language), and a tiny icon of a flag. The main purpose of the flag is to be eye-catching, in the hopes that it will be more obvious to non-English speakers that there might be a language that would work better for them. The secondary purpose of the flag, is to indicate the locale. This is where it fails miserably.

The people of Spain are, apparently, quite proud of their country. We frequently receive the complaint that we are Wrong to use the Mexican flag for Spanish. The good people of Argentina, Chile and Colombia don’t seem to mind, but the Spanish, they want to see their flag up there. I guess I can’t really blame them, I mean it is sort of the native home of the language, after all.

The observant will also notice that English shows the American flag, even though English really belongs to the English (that is to say, by that definition, English should have the UK flag next to it). In both cases, the country flags indicate the variant of the language being used. English has the US flag because it’s the US dialect. In the case of Spanish, the translations were done by our very own Carlos Perez whom by now you may have deduced, is from Mexico! Grooveshark uses the Mexican flag for our translation of Spanish because it is written in Mexican Spanish. For that reason, it would be disingenuous for us to use the Spanish flag.

Grooveshark doesn’t have anything against Spain. In fact, Spain is the only Spanish speaking country I have visited, and I found it to be quite nice. Grooveshark has nothing against Britain either, though I have never been there so I can’t speak to the niceness of said country. In any case, as soon as we have the chance, you can bet we’ll be getting the site translated into Spain-Spanish and UK-English, although as you can imagine there are lots and lots of other languages that we need a bit more urgently, such as French, Germain and Russian. Although it might hurt a little bit to see the “wrong” country up there, at least Spaniards can read the site in their native language, aside from the little idiosyncrasies that arise from it being a different dialect.