Superfeedr Blog

Earlier in May Last month, I was given the opportunity by my friend Brett to present PubSubHubbub at Google IO on stage with him. It was a great experience, and if you want to learn a bit more about PubSubHubbub and Superfeedr, I’d suggest you take the time to look...  

Superfeedr is growing, and we want to add value for our clients. Our newest feature requires us to store a lot of data, so we went out to look for appropriate solutions in the NoSQL ecosystem. The first decision was Riak, featuring persistent storage on disk and a very tunable...  

One of the most common problem of all Publish-Subscribe pattern is that they fail silently. Since the subscriber will always wait for the publisher (or the hub) to send him data, when a subscriber doesn’t receive new data it will assume that none was sent. Unfortunately, there could be other...  

It’s hard to talk about numbers, because they’re often subject to interpretation. I was crunching a few of them earlier today for some presentation that I’m working on and I found out that Superfeedr is currently pushing away about 237 new entries per second. On a daily basis, this is...  

I trust that we haven’t seen yet how much the realtime web is about to change the web. It’s currently quite hard to synchronize data between 2 services in an efficient way. Let’s see this scenario : Tom uses LinkedIn to store his job title. He also use Google Profile,...  

There is no doubt that feeds and social networks go along together very well. I even argued that building a social application without feeds and PubSubHubbub was a mistake. Today, we’re announcing that Superfeedr is now able to parse ActivityStreams data! We decided to add this to our schema (like...  

Like many others, we use Ruby EventMachine to make most use of CPU time in the cloud. Instead of blocking and waiting for responses from remote systems, we just memorize what is to be done and return to the main loop, taking care other things that are currently going on....  

There are two steps to open-data epiphany : support the OpenStack for your users data is the first step. I would argue though that this is not enough : if I tell you that all your data is available for you (or apps that want to get it – with...  

We use a lot of Ruby at Superfeedr. Even though we have some lower level languages for a few layers in our stack, we’re willing to trade some performance for the ease of development, testing and maintenance that Ruby offers. Also, our distributed architecture allows us to run more processes...  

In the past few weeks, our web server have really been pushed to limits that we weren’t expecting to reach so quickly. We’re now receiving between 150 and 300 requests per second. Some of them are PubSubHubbub subscriptions, but the bulk of it is pings that we receive for the...