Distributed Trail Bucket

Things went well today. Meg and I created a 'distributed trail bucket'.

For the last six months I've been tossing up the best way to effectively distribute Trexy's database load across the cluster.

After discussing the pros and cons we finally decided to bite the bullet and settled upon a distributed RAM bucket for storing incoming trail steps. Scalability and speed is crucial to this part of the system. When you blaze a trail each step you make lands in a temporary RAM bucket on one of the servers in our cluster. Soon after that the bucket is emptied into the database. By distributing the trail buckets around the cluster we share the load, guarantee speed and responsiveness while protecting the scalability of the overall system.

Phew! So what does all that mean? Basically we'll never again have a major meltdown moment!