So, you have an app. You can’t change the code. Now this isn’t the common case when I try to scale things. I usually roll up my sleeves and ignore application stack boundaries. This is a unique case where for political reasons, I can’t touch the app. So.. the app was a tiny little site, then it got popular on facebook and collegehumor and instead of pushing 5-10 megabits, it was falling apart at around 105 megabits due to resource saturation (one box wasn’t enough) and ended up needing to push 200 megabits.
I’ve been writing docs for Reconnoiter. I selected DocBookfor two reasons. First, I hoped that number of polished documents I’ve seen written in DocBook would mean that if this manual grows in size and usefulness we might be able to achieve some polish “on the cheap.” Second, our open-source sitehas a really nice automated systems for auto-publishing project documentation… if it is in DocBook. That said, DocBook is a complete pain in the ass.
Reconnoiteris coming along. Unlike most open source project, I tend not to talk about mine until their are really useful to people. Over the last year, I’ve adopted the unhealthy attitude that useful means “shiny front-end.” So, I’m blogging to break that attitude and talk a bit about project that doesn’t have a shiny front-end… yet.Reconnoiter is built out of years of frustration using tools like RRDTOOL, Munin, Cacti, ZenOSS, Nagios, etc.
