From Woot Wiki

Maintainer of http://woot.binarydata.net/ woot cache

I can be contacted on my personal site, http://vrillusions.com/contact

Contents 1 woot.binarydata.net updates (JUN 2008) 2 woot.binarydata.net updates (OCT 2007) 3 woot.binardyata.net updated (MAY 2007) 4 woot.binarydata.net updates (APRIL 2007) 5 my woot checker wishlist

[edit] woot.binarydata.net updates (JUN 2008)

• Updated the darkstar version to the latest one, supposedly this fixes the "dear jerkface' error that kept showing up, we'll soon find out... --Vrillusions 06:36, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] woot.binarydata.net updates (OCT 2007)

• Officially brought back online. I am just using the darkstar version for now until I ever do get arround to making my own checker. Apologies to those that liked the older version. Unfortunately it was buggy and was never updated to use the xml file instead of curling the main page. Until I get those fixed I'll just stick with darkstar as it works and is pretty efficient. --Vrillusions 14:00, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] woot.binardyata.net updated (MAY 2007)

• The day has come, unfortunately the bandwidth usage at my primary server has a much lower sustainable limit than I first thought. I tried to offload more traffic to the web host but aparently they can't handle serving up a cached html page to several hundred people at a time (wtf?). It's just too much traffic for the single server to handle and still not cost anything in bandwidth. Because of that I had to stop the cache before the 95th percentile went above the limit, which it would have if I let things continue. Now that there are a LOT more checkers out there than when I first started doing this several months ago, I don't feel too bad about doing this and I know all the other ones can absorb the 1,000's of people that used my site. I may bring it back at some time in the future and maybe limit it to a few hundred people or something. But it is offline until further notice. My apologies. Amusingly enough, when I took it down and posted a link to the list of woot checkers on here, this site got REALLY slow. Guess I had more people using it than I thought :) --Vrillusions 18:19, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
• I have to keep an eye on bandwidth usage since aparently we get a lot lower amount that I thought before it costs extra. Played with limiting it a lot and to say things got unstable is an understatement :) . This will probably be the last time I'll have a public woot-off page. It just creates too much traffic now. I've been trying to get cache settings to work so it caches the image and such and it's not really working. I may disable the image since the browser doesn't want to cache no matter how I tell it --Vrillusions 19:58, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Here's a tip to improve performance. I had my MaxKeepAlive set to 15 seconds. So it keeps a connection open for 15 seconds before closing it. Durring a normal browsing session that's acceptable but when you have a page refreshing every 15 seconds it really isn't :) I set that to 5 seconds and the child process count dropped really sharply while still maintaining the same number of accesses/sec. --Vrillusions 17:11, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
• Wootoff time again. Already started up the round robin dns. I may test out lighttpd again at some point. Still not using the xml feed. Although since I'm handling over 250 accesses per second it's still good. I apologize if this one is a little slower, had to throttle my bandwidth since I ate up all of it last time, although it wasn't during the woot-off. --Vrillusions 15:20, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] woot.binarydata.net updates (APRIL 2007)

• Around 7:00 PM EST I switched it back so just my server was handling requests and it ran fine (maxed at 700 processes). Has probably been the least stressful woot off. I've thought this for a while but coworker first mentioned it when I showed him the list of woot checkers. I actually have this feeling of responsibility because I'm the topmost stable server. Which, if sites are added according to the rules of newest one added to the bottom, that means I'm the longest running stable server. Even though I'm donating resources and server is eating up bandwidth (really need to go to ajax) I feel like I'll let down the 1,000's of people that use it during the course of the woot off. Hopefully I'll keep it there for a while. This has been a nice way to break in the new server :) --Vrillusions 03:46, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
• Spent lunch break trying to get lighttpd going and have apache proxy connections to it. Got that part working but I need to do some performance tuning since I kept seeing 500 errors and such. So if you noticed an occasional timeout during the last hour, that was why. Could just be how apache proxys the request to lighttpd. Could just add a second ip address to server and bind lightttpd to that so it would be a native request instead of this proxy stuff. Felt bad about it going down even it was only for a few seconds on an item that's taking forever to sell. May try playing with things later tonight but probably not. If I do I won't mess with things if an item is selling fast --Vrillusions 18:05, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
• Well, it lasted longer than I thought. I think something on the server is limiting it to 1000 processes (yes, that's how many it hit). At any rate, turned on round robin dns so now the two servers are running and everything seems fine. Guess I'll need to be looking into lighttpd. --Vrillusions 18:18, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
• OH NOES! TEH SERVARS R BURNIN UP! Good thing I actually checked today. Saw it was a woot off and tried to log in to the webhost and enable the doublecache. While modifying the index page to redirect to the cached html page the server just went to a crawl. Luckily the dns had a low TTL so I could set it to my server. The load average on the server reached a little over a 100 (even busy servers are usually less than 5). Now running on a solid server without worries of CPU overheating. Going to test a couple things this time. First, the new server is using xcache php accelerator and this is going to be a good load test for it. Second I am going to try running this from just my server, no round robin dns and no double caching. Each request is going to run the php file directly. So it will be slightly more accurate. Mainly it's just to see if xcache can handle it. Already getting a lot of traffic (my old server would have been fried by now if running just php) and load average is 0.66, not bad. Happy wootoff, feel free to contact me if you want to send me a free bag of crap :) --Vrillusions 06:17, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] my woot checker wishlist

Just some stuff I'm brainstorming about for next time to help maybe make things run more efficient. I'll mention it in here in case other developers see it and are inspired to implement some of this in theirs

• use xml page (full rewrite), make sure to round off percentage as I've seen a few sites that show 23.9999999% and such
  • Perhaps modify darkstar's script since it's already working and even has a fallback mechanism built into it.
• make an ajax version (would probably solve occasional white screens)
  • See Prototype
• text only version (very basic, terminal looking, single line so people can minimize it in the corner of their screen)
• show number of recent visitors (may have to use mysql so it can be updated/queried from several servers)
• keep seeing white screen of death in current implementation (beermovies). I think that's why even the original script I downloaded had javascript in the bottom frame to refesh the top page so if a white screen happens it doesn't kill the auto refresh. Would be solved by using ajax as well.
  • Noticed this only happens on web host, which is using the double cache. On my server that accesses the php file directly this has yet to happen.
• automate the double cache script so I don't have to run it (if I even use it with new version)
  • Not needed on my server, the web host still needs it though since they don't have a php accellerator going.