Hungry Machine

One of the challenges with writing a Facebook or Bebo application is staying within a limit it gives you to respond with data before it shows the Application Did Not Respond page to a user. Having a content reach application calling external APIs, like Amazon or YouTube, with response times beyond your control, forces you [...]

The challenge with hosting of multiple Rails-based Facebook applications is that the amount of users grow quickly. To address this problem we are using EC2 nodes that we can expand/shrink as the demand grows. The price/performance ratio isn’t quite what we first expected, so we are moving toward having a few dedicated boxes instead. Another [...]

We found that sometimes monit fails to restart all mongrel instances after deployment and some of them end up running with the pid file gone. Since there is no pid, monit believes the instance is not running so it tries to start a new one on the same port and, of course, fails. Which leads [...]

Developing applications for Facebook is a pain. The tunnel approach helps a lot to ease that pain but even then I prefer to start a FB app as a regular application, polish the logic, and then convert it to the Facebook one by adding FBML and such. At the early stages of the development I [...]

Some facebook applications might have multiple entries. For example, a user might be adding an application (action – new) or replying to an invitation (action – reply, param – id). Since the UI for Facebook application configuration allows to provide only static Post-Add URL it might seem like there is no way to route users [...]

Sometimes it is useful to do some action on a Facebook user right after your application has been installed by the user. For example, you might want to push some default FBML to user’s profile in case he does not complete the action you expect him to do after installation. Facebook application configuration allows to [...]