[MOBY-dev] post-memory-upgrade check

[markw at illuminae.com]

Hi all,

MOBY Central (in Vancouver) is now working on its memory upgrade.   
Please let me know ASAP if you experience anything yucky!  I noticed  
during my last workshop that if you tell all 30 students to hit the  
"query" button at the same time the registry machine crashes with an  
"out of memory" error in the system logs, so that's not good!   
Hopefully it will be more robust from now on.

The solution, of course, is to improve on the existing codebase... as  
many MOBYers have pointed out, I'm "just a biologist" and really  
shouldn't be coding production systems under *any* circumstances!  :-)  
  I agree entirely!

Now that we have implemented a (distributed) RDF representation of the  
registry, there are all sorts of new paradigms we could imagine for  
registry implementation, and these are best done in Java, since there  
is only minimal support for RDF in Perl at the moment... I'm going to  
ask Eddie to consider the possibilities for re-writing the entire  
registry in Java using an RDF store as the underlying database.  We  
will NOT do this without having a face-to-face meeting with the curent  
(5?) registry providers to ensure that the migration is painless, but  
I do think that it is perhaps the best way to move the project  
forward.  In particular, we want to move it out of the current Perl  
implementation into Java, which seems to be more familiar for most  
developers (and more powerful at the end of the day).

Still, no need to panic.  We can talk about this at the next  
developers meeting.  I'm trying to find the funds to help host this  
meeting... stay tuned!

Anyway, please test the registry using whatever mechanism you usually  
use to access it and let me know ASAP if you notice any problems.   
Hopefully the new memory is sufficient to get us through the next few  
months.  Nevertheless, the hits on the registry are still increasing  
monthly, so a new architecture will have to be implemented soon...

Best wishes all!

Mark