If you were looking for a great example of a collaborative map-reduce, then you don't have look much further than the amount of feedback and commentary that the earlier 'Collaborative Map-Reduce in the Browser' post received in a short span of twenty four hours. After making appearances on Slashdot,...

After immersing yourself into the field of distributed computing and large data sets you inevitably come to appreciate the elegance of Google's Map-Reduce framework. Both the generality and the simplicity of its map, emit, and reduce phases is what makes it such a powerful tool. However, while Googl...

Anytime you execute a Ruby application, or any language for that matter, the parser has to scan the source, split it into recognizable tokens, and construct an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) before the instructions can be turned into executable machine code. Sometimes this is done as a separate preproce...

Concurrency introduces parallelism into our applications, and threading is, of course, one way to achieve concurrency. But it turns out that in Ruby, this relation is not transitive: execution parallelism is not the same thing as threading. In fact, if you're looking for parallelism in your Ruby app...

Late last week Rails core team announced the release of Rails 2.2RC1, which amongst other things slips in 'thread safety' and an implementation of a connection pool for our beloved ActiveRecord. Pratik Naik and Charles Nutter have both covered the implications of these contributions, but the executi...

If you haven't already, I encourage you to take Splunk for a test drive. While there is no shortage of distributed log aggregators on the market, few if any come with as much flexibility and firepower when it comes to indexing and search when you need to find a needle in a haystack of log data. Afte...

Managing log files is like herding cats, except its worse: a typical LAMP / Rails stack will easily generate a dozen logs in different locations. The fun part is, of course, the debugging and server administration tasks which involve the forensic task of tracking down each of these files and then cr...

A brand new Rails/Merb app you put together over a weekend, a pack of Mongrels, a reverse proxy (like Nginx), and you're up and running. Well, almost, what about that one request that tends to run forever, often forcing the user to double check their internet connection? Response time is king, and y...

Amazon's recent announcement of SimpleDB generated a lot of buzz in the community - finally, a database service for our virtual infrastructure! Well, not so fast. SimpleDB is a far cry from the usual RDMBS we're all used to, and it's best described as a key-value store (BerkeleyDB, really), or a met...