Wonderful stuff! The Library of Congress has just released more than 10,000 digitized 78s from the Victor Talking Machine Company as a National Jukebox. The recordings are lovely and crackly, as if you’re listening on a gramaphone.
Tag Archives: Updates
Coverstore Improvements
We have done some improvements to coverstore, the Open Library book covers service, recently.
Now it is possible to access book covers by all the available identifiers. For example:
pystatsd & 5,000 Lists!
We’re working hard to improve Open Library’s general stability and performance, after a few harrowing weeks moving our hardware infrastructure around. We’re beginning to measure more stuff across the site, from general activity levels (about 40,000 catalog edits every month!) to quite specific actions (like, seeing that every second, 1-3 people open up our BookReader).
We’ve begun using a super awesome, real-time stats processing package called pystatsd, a Python implementation of Etsy’s statsd server. My favourite bit is a program that sits on top of that called graphite which takes all the stats we collect with pystatsd and renders them as graphs in a browser. Suddenly, we can see the system in a new and useful way.
We’re also looking hard at improving our memcached configuration, recently introducing another 4 memcached machines into our pool. Now that we can measure memcached hits and misses using pystatsd and graphite, we’ll be able to tell when our caching stuff is actually improving. Yay!
Another tweak you might find interesting… it used to be that lists would only show up on the main Lists page if they contained at least 3 seeds. The other day, Raj and I upped that to at least 5 seeds, and that immediately produced a selection of arguably more interesting lists, most of which settle around a subject area. Here’s a small selection:
- Victorian Illustrations by Old Book Illustrations
- Computer Technology by James Buckingham
- French psychology, 1880-1930 by John Carson
- The Best Books for Writers by Mary Gannon
- Bees by Iona Stewart
- And, not to blow my own horn too loud, but, I stumbled across what looks like a pretty good list on The (UK) Independent site, so I “transcribed” that into Open Library: The 50 Books Every Child Should Read
Have you made a great list, or found someone else’s? Let us know in the comments!
Scheduled Downtime: (Again) 9:30AM PST, 2011-03-10
Original post, 2011-03-07: The time has come for Open Library to migrate fully to the Internet Archive’s new virtual machine architecture. We expect the site to be down for about 2 hours as we move data and update various config files. Please bear with us… there are lots of balls in the air that we need to catch!
Also, we’ll post updates here if the plan changes.
Update, 11:30pm PST, 2011-03-07: Ok! The site’s back online, on brand new hardware. Everything looks about right, and we’re warming various caches and testing performance on various elements. Fingers crossed everything will warm up nicely over the next few hours. Yay!
Heads Up! Data Center Migration in progress
You might notice a few hiccups, timeouts or slow-loading pages as you wander around Open Library over the next few days. The whole Internet Archive is migrating to a new virtual machine data center, which is no mean feat.
From Open Library’s point of view, that means moving data and services to the new virtual machine configuration, and making sure that everything’s running smoothly. We’re hoping this move will result in faster performance, and flexibility for increasing hardware and improving tools into the future.