Nginx is Central's new friend
The load on Central has been increasing steadily over the past few months. Coincidence or not, it started shortly after Maven: The Definitive Guide was translated into Chinese. First, httpd was running out of connections, then as we adjusted those higher, the load on the system was getting out of hand. Most recently we were getting 15 minute load averages above 200 on a regular basis. To solve this and provide more redundancy, we started the process of installing a load balancer to share the load with a second machine. On a tip from James, we looked into Nginx “engine x”, which is supposed to be high performance http server. The central repository is currently not doing anything dynamic, the files are just sitting there on disk, updated occasionally via rsync. This means we are not leveraging the flexibility of httpd mods and the overhead was killing us.
To check it out, we installed Nginx in parallel to httpd and once everything looked good, swapped the ports to put it into production. How did it work out? Simply amazing. Since the swap, the loads are averging around .30. This is a quad core machine, so that means that it went from being 28x overloaded to using a third of ONE cpu. Being suspicious, I checked the bandwidth logs and response times. The average response time is 8x faster (no doubt because there’s 3 cpus sipping Mai Tais) and the total throughput shows no discernable change. So we’re now serving the same bandwidth that was swamping the cpus under httpd with next to no cpu with Nginx.
During the ongoing process of tracking the load on Central, we found a surprising number of large organizations out there with a very high connection usage. Please, if you’re using Maven in an enterprise, do us both a favor and install a repository manager such as Nexus. The entire community will benefit because the Central repo will be able to serve the needed artifacts in a timely fashion. You will benefit because it will give you centralized control over your artifacts, less external bandwidth use, less dependency on an external connection, indexing, searching and storage of your internal artifacts, and a ton of other functionality.
Sonatype: Free Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus & Hudson training in New Orleans!
At Sonatype we’re always working on our training material and always looking for better ways to improve it. Brian Fox, Bruce Snyder, and myself are going to be at ApacheCon this year to catch up with folks so we decided to provide a free one day training to gather feedback on the course material we have produced. The training will be held at the Marriot on Tuesday November 4th from 9am to 4pm. If you come to the training you’ll learn about learn about:
This course is intended for folks who are already somewhat familiar with Maven as the goal of the course is to show you how to setup your development environment where Maven is working optimally for a team setup, your developers are productive with Maven in Eclipse with m2eclipse, where your team artifacts are managed and secured by Nexus, and your build automation is humming along in Hudson.
We don’t have a lot of room available as this was a spontaneous decision given our training material is coming along faster then we expected. If you are interested in participating please email as at training at sonatype dot com and we’ll get you signed up. This is on a first come, first serve basis so if you’re interested I suggest you sign up quickly!
Everyone is welcome to sign up for the training. If you happen to be at ApacheCon or if you live in the area and are interested in Maven related technologies then by all means sign up!
Nexus as a War
One of the most requested features of Nexus has been to bundle it as a war. Well, i just finished testing 1.1 as a war in Jetty and Tomcat and it looks good. So stay tuned, the 1.1 release is just around the corner and the war bundle will be included.
Bechtolsheim's lesson
Bechtolsheim helped turn Sun, Granite, Google, VMWare and now Arista into some of the most successful startups ever. You could pick worse role models than Andreas von Bechtolsheim, when it comes to starting a company.
Browsing Javadoc for Dependencies in Eclipse: m2eclipse
I created this video as a response to Martjin Dashorst’s post on why Javadoc isn’t distributed with Wicket. Given the ease with which you can browse Javadoc in m2eclipse, I think the days of cutting a “distribution” with aggregated Javadoc are behind us. While it is entirely possible to create aggregated Javadoc with Maven, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to show people how simple it is to browse Javadoc and Source in m2eclipse.
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2057354[/vimeo]
