We’ve updated some of our core infrastructure and how we pass data throughout our systems. It’s been baking for a couple of weeks and ready to go. The result is that transactions are now significantly faster throughout the core system. The end result for customers are that page loads should be very, very snappy (especially if you’re on a fast Internet connection).
We’ve been busy the last few months updating PixtaSynapse and we’re getting ready to release a beta snapshot to our existing customers so they can get a feel for it, offer feedback, and we can begin the migration to the new release.
In this release, we’ve really focused on making transferring files easy.
1. We’ve redesigned the Inbox and added an additional thumbnail specific view. In both list and thumbnail views we’ve added the ability to drag and drop thumbnails to send files and recycle them.
2. We’ve updated our PDF renderer so it can process just about any complex PDF you can throw at it now.
3. Lots of design changes about how users are added and modified; taking what we learned from PixtaFlow and giving the user-management capabilities of PixtaSynapse the same ease-of-use.
4. We’ve woven virus-checking fluidly into our file pipeline so that checking for viruses is now faster. Since we’re being helpful…we’re also displaying the 10 most active viruses in your Inbox updated automatically.
5. We’ve changed our thumbnail renderer so it renders thumbnails even faster now.
6. Speaking of thumbnails, when you upload a giant file our renderer it will diligently process files up to 500Meg Pixels. And…when the render is completed it will automagically update the placeholder image in your Inbox.
7. Tool-tips/hovering: Are now enabled so when you hover the cursor briefly over a thumbnail, you’ll see details about that image: file type, file size, date uploaded, date downloaded, who sent you the file, etc. If the file is being worked on by some task in the file pipeline, you’ll see the current state of it in the tool-tip.
8. Right-clicking on a thumbnail generates a pop-up which you can choose an appropriate action: {Download, Send, Recycle and File Properties}.
9. Underneath the hood, our infrastructure is being revamped to accommodate more customers gracefully while still maintaining the great quality of service we’re known for. We’ll be working on this as needed to continue to make PixtaSynapse the easiest way to transfer files on the planet.
10. We’ve added a bunch more bandwidth and storage behind the scenes and will continue to do so as the service continues to grow.
11. Almost forgot to mention: while we’ve added lots of great features, more bandwidth and storage for all existing customer accounts – we’re doing so at no additional cost.
Your comments are really important to us so please let us know how we’re doing. Either leave a comment here, send email, or give us a call.
We’ve been spending way to much time tuning our traffic shaper. It’s challenging but is turning out to be really great for customers during hours of peak traffic. What is traffic shaping? Think of it as managing lanes of traffic on the freeway using metering lights, express-lanes etc. The traffic zooms when the freeway is lightly traveled, and managed well, but when the lanes start to get congested, or traffic chaotic, traffic slows.
Wouldn’t it be nice if when the traffic isn’t congested in the opposite direction those lanes could be made available to relieve congestion? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a strict set of traffic flow rules that every driver followed to make everyone’s trip faster. Traffic shaping allow building a set of rules/lanes in which all of our network traffic flows. It is similar to the freeway analogy but allows us to meter traffic before congestion gets too bad as well as dynamically changing the number of lanes based on demand.
What does this mean for our customers? Faster response and transfer. When there is demand, traffic is scheduled in the Pixta system so intelligently reallocates bandwidth under peak loads. By design, in the PixtaSynapse system, larger plans get slightly prioritized over smaller plans. The Pixta traffic-shaper is constantly prioritizing traffic to give you the best transfer rates we can provide. The end result is that we think you’ll find file transfers responsive and consistent whenever you transfer files, day or night, in whatever timezone or continent you live in.
We have made some serious improvements to the speed and consistency of our core service infrastructure. In the past, when several file transfers were taking place behind the back of PixtaFlow or PixtaStore it would steal bandwidth from other services and cause occasional slow-downs on searches and other database queries.
We have done two things to fix this:
1) Traffic shaping of the incoming connections based on the service. In the past a service like PixtaSynapse could have used all available bandwidth causing the remaining services to fight for bandwidth. Now bandwidth is explicitly carved out and automagically “shaped” to meed the demands of all services. This will all be invisible for users and the result is a higher quality of service.
2) Increased bandwidth: we now have a Gigabit connection to the Internet that can be added to as demand increases. What this means is that the quality of service should be zippy, and in-combination with the traffic shaping, deliver consistent performance.
We’ll be tuning the traffic-shaper over the next month in which we hope to get additional performance gains and will report our progress here.
First the bad news: the co-location company that houses our servers experienced another failure of their “Uninterruptable Power System” at around 8AM this morning. This is the second-time in three days. We have been with this company for years and never had a problem, then twice in three-days. We spent some time today discussing this with our service provider as the UPS was being replaced/fixed. The end result is that all Pixta systems were up pretty quickly but the really good news is that our service provider has granted us a large bandwidth increase. We are now seeing transfer speeds in the Megabit/sec range rather than the Kilobit/sec. range. The PixtaSynapse system is really fast now, especially as we’re now load-balancing against all of our services to provide a consistent quality of service for each brand. Your mileage may vary depending on the time of the transfer. But we think you’ll be really happy with the increased speed of transfers.
Sorry to report the Pixta servers in our Northern California co-location facility suffered a bit of downtime due to a power failure and failure of a uninteruptable power supply to engage.
Our service provider writes:
“The incident lasted approximately 3 seconds. Two UPSes failed. Power was routed around them and power was restored. ”
… “takes its network and power stability seriously. We are working with the UPS manufacture to determine the exact cause of the failure.”
The main point here is that our systems had some downtime as a result of losing power. Three-seconds of power-loss isn’t the issue and minimizes the real problem. One cycle of power loss is to much as power loss occurs. We lost 180 of them and it turned off shut-down our Nor-cal systems. Why, because when power returned to the Pixta infrastructure the servers need to reboot in a unique order. This starting cadence failed to occur after the power outage and extended the down-time.
We’re talking with our service provider to find out how they plan on preventing “Uninterruptable Power Supplies” from failing in the future the results in service disruptions for our customers.
Sincere apologies if you suffered a service interruption as a result of this outage. If this disruption of service impacted your work trying to use Pixta services, please feel free to contact us and we’ll work something out. Once we have resolution on this issue we’ll post it here.
