Making Support Tools – Slow, but Necessary
This afternoon I had to make a lot of tools for supporting the app I've been working on. I'm getting bug reports, and I need to look into the data we're generating, and the only place it really all sits is in the CouchDB. So I had to write some scripts to hit some views and then load up the values I want with some key restrictions. None of it was all that hard, but when I needed to make a change to one of the views on the production database, I had to wait upwards of a couple of hours for Couch to regenerate the view due to the amount of data we have, and the limitations of the EC2 instance we're currently running on.
Soon enough, we'll be on our own hardware in our datacenter, but it's hard to beat the spin-up time of an EC2 box. It's pretty nice. But the performance isn't all that great, and that's what we're really running up against - I/O to the disk and CPUs to process. I'm hoping that as soon as we get the new machines, things like this will be a lot faster.
All told, I got built what I needed, and it's just a matter of time to be able to use it.
[10/9] UPDATE: worked perfectly! Once I got in this morning, I was able to use these views and tools to look into the bug reports and prove that they aren't bugs - the code is working exactly as designed.