Tag: server

Serving pages through HTTP/2

This morning (well… extremely early morning, at 3 AM New York time) we rolled out another important upgrade to our front-end servers.

What do we mean by “front-end” servers? These are the servers that are actually serving the Spin Rewriter website with all its subpages to our awesome customers like yourself.

For contrast, the “back-end” servers run the actual ENL semantic spinning algorithms and do all the heavy lifting in terms of running the machine learning models, neural networks, selecting good synonyms given the context of your article, etc.

Anyway, our front-end servers have now been upgraded to support HTTP/2. That’s the newest reliable version of the protocol that’s used for communication between servers and web browsers (e.g. Chrome or Firefox or Safari).

As a result of this upgrade, the entire Spin Rewriter website will load even faster and feel even snappier. I think you’re going to like this upgrade. 😀

Server migration successful

Phew!

That was a long and hard-working day at the Spin Rewriter office…  If you can really call 28 hours of constant effort by everyone at the office a “day”. A huge thank-you to everyone involved, from server admins to our amazing customer support experts!

Even before we announced our scheduled migration to a newer server infrastructure on Monday, we had been looking into every possible way to minimize the downtime that inevitably comes with the migration. I believe we did a decent job… although the migration itself was still a major effort, and took a bit longer than planned.

You can read all about the migration with constant status updates here…

But now that the migration is over (and successful!), we couldn’t be happier about it!

Mainly for two big reasons:

1) We’ve decided to go forward with the migration for a good reason — namely, performance. And looking at the performance metrics that we’ve been running on our entire codebase ever since the migration, we can hardly believe what we’re seeing.

The new infrastructure absolutely FLIES! In some areas we’re seeing 400-450% improvements in speed, and that’s before we’ve even rolled out any hardware-specific optimizations! This is genuinely incredible…

2) Our previous operating system was only guaranteed security updates until the end of 2019 — which is fast approaching. We’ve decided to make the most of the inevitable downtime so we’ve taken the opportunity to update the operating system across our entire infrastructure. Truth be told, this cost us another 3.5 hours of service unavailability, but we believe the payoff will be more than worth it.

Our systems are now guaranteed full security updates until 2024! And as a geeky, techy, security-oriented person this makes my heart sing. 😀

You’ve probably already noticed the difference in speed and responsiveness when using Spin Rewriter — and we’ll keep on working really hard to make the absolute most of this big upgrade to our infrastructure. I’m sure you’re going to love it!

 

Scheduled server migration (Wednesday, November 14)

In two days (on Wednesday, November 14th) we will be migrating and upgrading our Spin Rewriter servers which will unfortunately require some downtime of our website & API service.

The migration itself was proposed by our hosting provider because they want to move us to a new & improved infrastructure, and after a careful examination of the potential benefits we’ve agreed to move forward with the migration.

Before we agreed, though, we’ve performed an analysis of our usage patterns and determined that the best (or least inconvenient, if you will) time for a couple of hours of service unavailability would be early Wednesday morning.

We’ve also scheduled a number of updates on our end for the same time frame, to make sure that we make the most of the migration & upgrade procedure and the downtime it entails.

So — please expect a few hours of downtime on early Wednesday morning, and then we’ll be back stronger than ever! 😀

Bottom line: On Wednesday, November 14th, our website & API service will experience some expected downtime as part of a scheduled migration & upgrade procedure. We apologize for any inconvenience!

We’ve rolled out an improved DB structure

As I’ve already mentioned in my previous Redis-related post, we’re improving the data-related structure of our back-end algorithms in order to deliver even more efficient, faster ENL Semantic Spinning to our awesome Spin Rewriter users.

This time around we’ve rolled out an update to the structure of our regular SQL databases. This update has significantly reduced the size of some of the database tables (in some cases, the improvement has been as high as 64-65% which is astonishing) which resulted in much faster database queries…

…which once again translates into a faster & better user experience, and a more robust platform!

We’re moving some of our processing to Redis

Once again we’ve improved our core infrastructure a bit which resulted in an even faster user experience for our awesome Spin Rewriter users, plus our back-end systems are now even more robust as an added benefit.

We’ve upgraded some of the more CPU-intensive algorithms so that they no longer rely on regular SQL databases. They’re now able to take advantage of the full power of Redis. So, what’s that? Here’s what their official website says about Redis:

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes with radius queries. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.

I realize this sounds like a bunch of gibberish, but here’s what it really means.

Basically, Redis takes certain types of data operations and performs them in a much, much more effective way than your regular SQL database. This results in a significant speed-up of CPU-intensive algorithms such as Spin Rewriter’s incredibly advanced ENL Semantic Spinning technology.

Hope you’re loving the even faster, improved Spin Rewriter! 😉

Improved parallelization of CPU-intensive tasks, Part II

OK, we’re back!

As I mentioned in the previous post (published on February 9th), here at Spin Rewriter we always strive to further improve our server infrastructure and fine-tune our code. We’re looking to deliver faster and better software that’s more intuitive and more robust than ever before.

We’ve now taken advantage of some new opportunities to parallelize certain aspects of Spin Rewriter’s existing spinning process. This means that we’re now able to run certain parts of the spinning process on multiple processors (CPUs) on different servers at the same time instead of running it on just one server.

Here’s a simplified explanation of the benefits this brings. Imagine you have an article with 20 sentences. We can either have our software detect the parts-of-speech on each of those sentences in a row, and if it takes our software one second to analyze every sentence, we’re looking at 20 x 1 second = 20 seconds of waiting time for the user.

We can, however, break this article down into 20 separate sentences — and send each of these sentences to a different server in our grid at the same time. Each of those 20 servers then processes just one sentence, and only 1 second later we get the processed results back to the central system.

The result: The same article is now fully processed in just 1 second instead of 20.

And the result that matters much more than that: Our users are even happier! 😀

Of course the exact real-world situation isn’t as cut and dry, but we were still able to roll out a significant improvement in speed and robustness of our spinning systems — and we hope you’ll love it!

Improved parallelization of CPU-intensive tasks

OK, the title of this post might sound a bit “high and mighty”, but hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand once we break it down a bit.

As you probably already know, our server infrastructure is quite state-of-the-art which allows Spin Rewriter to have great uptime and to always process all of your articles, find the best synonyms, manipulate sentence structures, export thousands of text files etc. etc. in a matter of seconds.

We always strive to further improve our infrastructure and our back-end software code. Faster, better, more intuitive, more robust — this is what drives us.

We’ve recently dug extra deeply into our software and found some new opportunities to parallelize some aspects of the spinning process. In other words, we’re now able to run a certain aspect of the spinning process on multiple processors (CPUs) on different servers at the same time instead of running it on just one server.

We’ll bring you more details in our next post, however right now we can already give you a hint that GREAT things are underway. Stay tuned! 😉

 

Smooth sailin’

Phew,

It’s always quite stressful whenever we’re tweaking any particular bit of our server network… Let alone completely revamping our infrastructure, upgrading every server in the process, and rolling out HTTPS (SSL) at the same time!

But now, after 2 full weeks, I can confidently say that our server infrastructure upgrade has been a resounding success all-around!

It’s been smooth sailing for 14 straight days now, without even a hint of issues or down-time, and our users are reporting an even better user experience than before. And that’s always a huge success in our book!

 

Biggest server upgrade ever is looking GOOD!

As mentioned in my post from August 5th (and my other post from August 7th) we’ve just rolled out the biggest server infrastructure upgrade EVER in the entire history of Spin Rewriter.

We started moving all data over to the new infrastructure at 11:42 AM EDT today. The first instance of downtime occurred at 11:48 EDT and lasted 6 minutes. The second (and last) instance of downtime occurred at 1:22 PM EDT and lasted 14 minutes.

When all our websites became available once again at 1:36 PM EDT, the spinning functionality of Spin Rewriter took an additional 26 minutes to fully reboot.

Since 2:02 PM EDT all of our systems have been up & running, and running better than ever before! 😀

As an added bonus, we also switched the entire Spin Rewriter website over to the HTTPS protocol with an SSL certificate today, for added security and reliability.

This means you can update your bookmarks to https://www.SpinRewriter.com 😀

Bottom line, I hope you’re going to LOVE this new, snappier, even more robust Spin Rewriter! 😉

< Part 1: We’re working on the biggest server upgrade EVER
< Part 2: Our biggest server upgrade ever just became even BIGGER

Our biggest server upgrade ever just became even BIGGER

I already told you a little bit about our upcoming humongous server upgrade two days ago, on Wednesday… and I’m super happy to say that the upgrade is coming along very nicely, indeed!

We’ve settled on the final configuration of our new servers and we’ve already rolled out a parallel grid of brand-new servers with an identical copy of Spin Rewriter so we can work on the copy without disturbing anyone on the actual “live” website. Right now we’re in the testing stage and I believe we’ve already squashed most of the bugs that felt like making an appearance after the huge server migration.

In other words, we’re progressing quite nicely! So nicely, in fact, that we’ve decided to go a step further than planned while still sticking to our original timeframe. With the finalized server upgrade next week we’re now also planning to roll out SSL support, in other words that green “https” version of the Spin Rewriter website for extra security and reliability.

We’re very excited about this (as you can probably tell), and will keep you posted! 😉

> Part 3: Biggest server upgrade ever is looking GOOD!