Since my initial experiments with GridFS and nginx-gridfs, I discovered a rather downer of a dealbreaker: compiling Passenger and nginx-gridfs into the same nginx binary makes nginx very unhappy. It hard-freezes (as in, blocks forever) when you request a GridFS file with Passenger enabled. Oops. So, I sat down and fixed gridfs-fuse. You can grab [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Feb
17
2010
Serving files out of GridFS
GridFS is a nifty little feature in MongoDB that allows you to store files of all shapes and sizes in Mongo itself, getting the benefits of Mongo’s sharding and replication. However, since they’re in a database, and not on the filesystem directly, how do we serve them? There are lots of benchmarks and numbers under [...]
Feb
15
2010
counter_cache for MongoMapper
I’ve started playing with MongoMapper, and it’s quite excellent, but it does suffer very much from being young. There are lots of pieces missing that veterans of ActiveRecord will take for granted. I’ve been working around or patching them, for the most part, but I felt that my solution to `:counter_cache` deserved a post. In [...]
Feb
10
2010
Safe action caching with Memcached
I’ve started using action caching more aggressively, to handle a large volume of not-signed-in search traffic. It composes a significant chunk of my site’s total traffic, but there’s no good reason to be recomputing full pages for all those long-tail hits. So, the obvious thing is to just implement a quick action cache. # Controller [...]