hey guys this is paul from socialmoth.

we had about 20k more users come in and use socialmoth than we expected the other day. that is MORE, not total. up until that point, the dot-com and the fb app were working on the same server and using the same database.

my focus has been entirely following the users, and the users are on facebook. also i should follow the money, and that is also facebook. i moved the fb app to a new set of servers sunday, but i haven't moved the dot com to the same servers yet.

i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if anyone wants to give advice)

rkabir, if you ask a specific question about flow, i can tell you want i know and can make public. the sites popularity was due to the facebook users. nothing i made scaled well enough for the new popularity and i haven't gone back and redone all of the dot com code to match the facebook scaled/optimized code.

omouse, do you use socialmoth? new features are on the way. they are done, but not publicly shown yet. also, my facebook users are dying for new features and suggesting them, but they realize there is a lot of scaling work to do. (i love how nice my users are) sometimes you just need to take a break and make new stuff though.

I haven't used it, but you might look into this as well: http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/index.html

with mongrel: http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/mongrel.html

I am using swiftiply's evented mongrel + nginx for my site. I am tremendously happy with it and would be happy to spread the love (and config files). Email is in my profile.

how many boxes do you have?

Just one 4-core box.

i'll look in to it. no matter what i do, mod proxy balancer appears to not actually balance equally. i think i need to read more about it. and see if there is a mysterious setting.

balance=1

of the boxes, the first box always has a much higher load.

Mongrel, mod_proxy_balancer, and mongrel are all ass. Moving to nginx helped out a bit, but not really. Rails is lame because all the time you saved writing your app gets eaten up by rewriting it and doing sysadmin tasks with undocumented software. Sadly, for my next project I'll be pulling a Derek Sivers.

> i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if anyone wants to give advice)

I haven't compared the various load balancers, but have you considered pound? It's small, lean, mean and easy to set up.

don't know anyone using pound, know one person who left it. i prefer solutions that are more mainstream for things that should be very well established and solved problems.

paul - thanks for answering. I was concerned that an awesome site like socialmoth had lost its userbase - glad to see my worry was unfounded.

(disclaimer: i totally miss the old school socialmoth.com and the community without any facebook - but if fb is where it's at, then fb is where it's at. i was the one who posted a couple times that i was glad you put ads on sm - i REALLY like the site / concept)

it seems (at first glance) that the facebook app has less comments / conversations based on posts than the main domain - is this something you've seen from an aggregate perspective?

otherwise, it seemed (from a user's perspective) that sm had this core set of users in the beginning - i read about it on techcrunch, etc. and then when the facebook app came out - all hell broke loose (not to mention "love inflation"). I'm guessing facebook caused a near-exponential spike in users?

also - props on overhear.us - looking forward to enjoying it as well.

i miss it too. the original crew was hilarious and smart. i'm working towards more personalization and localization, but it is a couple steps away, and lot of those steps are scaling, speed, and caching/invalidation.

the fb app has a different feel because of the high volume of posts. it is almost impossible to refind a post. we have notifications, but just not enough, and nothing as good as the old socialmoth.com. working towards it though.

the first week socialmoth on facebook was out, it doubled every 29 hours.

the most common feature request is "negative hearts" whatever that means.

oh i know what negative hearts are... haha

depending on your (my) mood - sometimes there's a post that needs to be unloved. but i think if you implemented that - most posts would be in the negative hearts.

unsolicited feature ideas to keep things relevant(knowing that scaling, etc are way more important):

let me subscribe to people, while still keeping things anonymous. some posts i really like, etc - that can be used to mix in a higher number of their other posts with my main consumption (if you're not already doing this).

similarly - let me ignore people. you could have some algorithm-fu to keep track if i hit ignore on the same person multiple times - for a real ignore, rather than just a bad post.

i also imagine an overhear.us facebook app is in the works? :)

Odd, after I posted the exact same question about shoutfit, I saw this. Must be something in the air..

herdrick: I posted "is the site dead? i made a post yesterday morning and it's still on the front page." on socialmoth about 12 hours ago - and it's still on there. I stopped going when the site became too popular - and now - my posts stay on the frontpage for 12-72 hours... I wondered if the mass of [contributing] users had left...

The main site is still growing, I think and the Facebook app is really successful. I'm not sure what you mean.

(not to mention - what can be learned from the flow of the users to / away from the site over time)