SteemWorld ~ Weekly Support ~ #3

[EN]

This post is intended to cover the server costs for SteemWorld.org and to enable me to continue my development in the future.

In case you missed the first part:
SteemWorld ~ Weekly Support ~ #1

[DE]

Dieser Post ist dafür gedacht die Serverkosten für SteemWorld.org zu decken und mir in Zukunft weitere Entwicklungen zu ermöglichen.

Falls du den ersten Teil verpasst haben solltest:
SteemWorld ~ Weekly Support ~ #1

Decisions Made

I'm going to order a few new servers in the coming weeks, one of them in the next days already. The current server that is handling the requests from SteemWorld is definitely not sufficient for the things which I've planned in the near future.

The coming 'Post Finder' requires much more SSD memory than I currently have available because I need to index much more data and my SQLite databases would eat my server to 100%. I will order two new dedicated machines / Xeon E5 (4c @ 3.7GHz) with 2x480GB SSD (Raid), 64GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz.

The blockchain is growing fast and a full-text index on the body column for all posts in the chain comes with some crazy requirements. My local machine was dead after indexing only 20%. SSD full, HDD to slow (would take months). Even if a large part of the coding for the Post Finder is done already I can't really test it yet.

The good thing is: I've found a high quality hoster that is way cheaper than my current one. The bad thing is: I need to move my data and reconfigure the whole setup.

Step One: Witness

Many people asked me why I'm no witness yet and my answer has been something like "I won't run any software on my server that I don't fully trust/understand". Maybe I'm different than most witnesses who just started the job via kind of a 'start witness' button. There is no automated way when it comes to understanding the core and I want to be able to react to unforseeable misbehaviours by myself. Quality always needs time and experience.

I'm currently writing some handy shell scripts for my coming witness servers so that I can install, update and configure the dockerized steemd instances in a comfortable way. My goal is to have an own 'Steem-in-the-box' like solution with some more possibilities for setting up the node configuration (memory management for example). I'm going to make it open source and publish the scripts on GitHub, when all works fine and tests/optimizations have been made.

Main Menu -> Node Setup
Set node type -> Exchange
Set account name for tracking transfers -> 'exchange-name'
Main Menu -> Start Node

Soon ;)

Step Two: Post Finder

As the contract with my current hoster will still be active for a month from now, I'm going to move SteemWorld to the new server in about three weeks. After that I can begin implementing the Post Finder.

In Between: Improved Node Request Caching

The new caching feature for account operations will be activated in the coming days. It will improve loading times for repeated page visits by caching the operations data and storing the last received op index in a cookie.

In The Making

Post Finder

The following images show how the new feature could look like, but there are already a few changes planned that are not being shown in there. As mentioned, I'm going to index the body content of all posts on my new server, so that we finally have a way to search for posts by text/words very fast. This feature wasn't planned from the beginning and it increases the server requirements a lot but I have to think bigger here and I want to be prepared for future additions.