We've been working hard on improving our infrastructure over the last 6-7 months and many improvements have already been made. In early February we migrated to AWS and now run our entire stack with Elastic Beanstalk in docker containers. Everything is now infinitely scalable and has moved from a traditional best-efforts hosting solution to high availability infrastructure. Our traffic has multiplied at an exponential rate. But, there's still room for improvement.
Join us in testing these optimizations!
We'd like you to join us in helping test a new feature which will bring some great performance optimizations to steemit.com. In the interest of catching potential bugs before they get rolled out to production, we'd like to get as much real-world exposure to these changes as possible. You can now experience these changes live at https://steemitstage.com.
Keys
Our staging environment includes the same security measures taken for steemit.com and is considered pre-production, it's designed to be as close to the 'real' steemit.com as possible in order to fully vet new code before it makes it to steemit.com. If you're still worried about using your keys, you're welcome to just use your posting key. Even if you don't login, just browsing the site without logging in and providing feedback to us is still useful.
What's changed?
We're implementing a new custom designed proxy and caching layer in front of steemd, which is the back end blockchain service that the front-end website talks to in order to perform all actions on steemit.com. Most read-only requests to steemd will now be cached in an elasticache/redis database and served directly from it instead of having to communicate with a steemd cluster for requests that are already cached. This will most likely improve performance of general site usage dramatically.
In addition, historically websocket technology has been used by the front-end in order to speak to steemd. Websockets certainly have their advantages over traditional HTTP, but when it comes to large-scale infrastructure it's much more difficult to properly load balance and distribute active connections. Further, traditional HTTP/JSONRPC calls are more common and generally easier for 3rd party developers to use and develop with. Because of these reasons, our proxy/caching layer will still talk to steemd using websockets but everything else (the front-end plus new services being developed) will talk to the proxy/caching layer now using HTTP/JSONRPC. In order to make this possible some new updates were made to the steem-js javascript library to be able to utilize HTTP/JSONRPC in condenser (front-end app that is steemit.com).
If you're still curious, since our code is open source, you're always welcome to look over it yourselves. The proxy/caching layer is called 'jussi' and is available at https://github.com/steemit/jussi. Steem-js is at https://github.com/steemit/steem-js and the front end (steemit.com) is at https://github.com/steemit/condenser.
Feedback
Please leave any feedback about your experience using steemitstage.com on this thread. Visually, the site will look identical - these are changes that are invisible to you visually, but you should feel an improvement in speed while browsing around and utilizing the site. If anything is broken, please let us know. You're also welcome to reach out to me (@justinw) on steemit.chat if you'd like.
Justin Welch (@justinw - Steemit DevOps Engineer)
disclaimer: steemitstage.com is not setup for high availability and could be broken or completely down at times