FeedBlendr.com

Having some sort of problem with refreshing the contents of feeds right now which I’m looking into.

Basically this will mean that your blends will appear to not have any new posts in them, even though the source feeds are updating.

It looks like this is actually a file-system problem being caused by there being too many files in a single directory and thus confusing the system into thinking that files are fresh (there’s over 45,000 files in cache directory…)

I’ll be fixing this today, but the change won’t be live until tonight most likely. Sorry for the delay.

UPDATE (7:00pm WST): This problem should be “fixed” now, at least for long enough to roll out the new version of FeedBlendr. The problem was indeed in the caching model, and it goes a little something like this:

MagpieRSS uses an md5 hash of the URL where it got a feed from to create a filename to store its cached copy under. That’s fine under normal circumstances, but I had over 45,000 cache files in a single directory, and PHP was choking when trying to figure out if a file was fresh or stale, and for some reason it was assuming it was fresh.

I’ve adjusted the way that Magpie caches files, so now it’s using a directory structure 5 levels deep, based on the md5 name of the cache file, which should mean that at the deepest level, there are less files per directory, thus avoiding this problem for a while.

Thanks for your patience and I hope it didn’t cause too many problems for you all out there. Let’s all look forward to the new version (coming soon, honest!), which will hopefully work around things like this!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 11:00 am and is filed under FeedBlendr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.