gltail
We thought gltail sounded pretty cool. So we hooked it into bloglines.com:
(Screenshot is clipped to protect user data)
It worked okay for 1 webserver. But hooking it up to the entire cluster, it was just a little bit too slow — drawing a new frame once every 8 seconds. Time to port it to C 
October 8th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
That’s just insane. Could I ask how many activities were shown per frame? Would it even be possible to render at a decent framerate in C?
October 9th, 2007 at 12:09 am
You could try is to remove the server.add_event calls (the X & O characters) as drawing fonts is horribly slow with the default bitmap I use.
Also, add a :type => 3 to some of the server.add_activity calls, to disable the blob and just get the statistics.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Dropping the X/O helps quite a bit. Thanks for the tip.
But even with that off, we quickly drop bellow 1 FPS. Activities is >80,000 right now, and the site is in its lowest usage right now.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:06 am
BTW, Erlend, I used to play planetarion….
October 9th, 2007 at 1:17 am
With that kind of traffic, it’s pointless to show each and every one of the requests as a dot.
I think I’d change the first line of Element#add_activity to something like:
@pending.push Item.new(message, size, @color, type) if( type != 3 && rand(100) < 2)
to show just a percentage of the dots while still keeping the stats.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:27 am
Haha.. Planetarion… Now that’s a blast from the past. It’s still running in some form, but we pulled out many years ago after failing with a pay-to-play model. Was loads of fun though, and I’m still impressed with how many dynamic pages we were able to push without using any form of caching, on 6 normal desktop servers.
Spinner is still alive and running http://www.managerleague.com (the site with traffic in my glTail movie).
October 10th, 2007 at 5:27 am
Your live data looks like my gTail output when I run 10,000 old log lines through it