We’re going to make a quick update to the site tonight between 2:30 and 3 AM (EST). The site should still behave itself, and you probably won’t be effected–but in case something goes horribly awry, here’s fair warning!
Nothing major is being changed, and we’re only making a couple of little fixes to annoying babybugs. If you notice anything going crazy during or after this time, however, be sure to let us know!
Resume regular transmission.
My dear friend Devin Dotson has traveled to Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) and the world’s Southern-most city of Punta Arenas to see the glaciers of southern Chile before global warming melts them away! On his excursion through the frozen lands of the Western Patagonia, he proudly placed a piece of Grooveshark for all of Punta Arenas to see. This sticker has traveled an extraordinary distance of 5,741 miles (approximately)! Thank you Devin and to all of our Chilean users who keep on rockin’ with Grooveshark!
We try our hardest to bring you a reliable, fun-to-use place for listening to old favorites and discovering new music. Being a somewhat new company and, indeed, being a small bunch, we’ve run into some bugs as we’ve worked to keep up with all of your interest in Grooveshark–and we’re so very, very thankful. Grooveshark Chief Information Officer, Colin Hostert, has taken some time to explain a bit of the behind the scenes, complete with updates on where we stand now. Take a look!
Over the last week you may have noticed a few hiccups in the availability of our beloved Grooveshark. Most of those issues have centered around issues we were having with our storage device: a Sun x4500. We use this device to store content for our various websites (Grooveshark Beta and Grooveshark Lite), so when it goes down, things go crazy. I would like to share with you an email I sent to our developers explaining to them what happened in hopes that it will answer any questions you all might have. If anyone has any further questions or insight please feel free to comment and I will reply as best I can.
Ok, so quick recap of what happened with the x4500 (SAN). There is a bug in ZFS that caused a destroy command to hang, so after it hung I had to wipe the ZFS config file and import the pools (partitions). This should be a quick process, but because the box got rebooted during a destroy operation, extra consistency checks had to be run which caused the import to take forever. There is supposedly a patch that solves the destroy hang issue, but I am having trouble getting it to install because of conflicts with other patches sun wanted installed. I am still working with Sun on this.
Big point here is that everything is back up and it appears to be stable. Now, to answer a few questions:
A bug? WTF I thought Solaris was supposed to be uber-stable.
This is a good point. My general outlook is that it is a very new hardware platform, and new software (in terms of filesystem age). The 4500 is the first system to routinely push ZFS to 30TB working sets, so issues are popping up here that wouldn’t show on smaller hardware. Also, the platform has 4 controller cards, and 48 hard drives. That is a lot of interaction with hardware, which demands the drivers and firmware be perfect on the 4500. Also, the bug was only on the 4500 and not apparent in all destroy operations.
Does this crash mean ZFS sucks and is not suitable for production usage?
If anything I think this speaks to the strength of ZFS. There was a hang during an operation that was destroying part of the filesysem (at my request). During that operation the box was cold rebooted, which is almost a worst-case scenario. Even with all of that there is 0 loss or corruption of data, and in theory 0 chance of that ever happening because of the insane consistency checks ZFS does.
Does this mean you suck and should have kept up with patches to keep this from happening? or Why wasn’t the box patched?
The particular patch that Sun tells me will fix the issue is only available as an IDR (it’s not an official patch yet). As an IDR it will not show up in the update manager nor is it posted anywhere on the net. They only hand it out if someone has an issue that requires it, so there is little preventative action that could be done Again, the bug only effects a small percent of destroy operations (we have done destroys dozens of times with no issues) and it is only on the x4500, so I guess they figured it could wait to go through their normal QA/patch system vs. doing an emergency release of it.
We are not a storage solutions company, is it realy worth messing with the 4500 and getting it right? Why don’t we just store our data in “the cloud”?
There are three reasons we’re not using Amazon S3 exclusively: price, flexibility, and vendor neutrality. To be honest, most of it is price.
So are we operating in a crippled mode since we can’t destroy volumes?
Thankfully no. While we used it a lot in the beginning for testing, the destroy command is not something we have needed to use much recently. I dont see the need to destroy an volumes in the next 60 days.
Once the IDR patch is applied will everything be stable and bug free?
Not completely. The Linux kernel has been around forever and it still has bugs, and no system will ever be bug free. However, I do think we’ll soon get to the point where the only bugs left are so small that we wouldn’t notice.
Thanks for your support and patience, and if you have any questions or thoughts, leave a comment or send me a message.
I like to think that there was a time in music where bands took more than three minutes to decide what their names would be. Bands names are constantly changing and gaining or losing punctuation.
Maybe all the good ones are already taken.
Or maybe bands are under the illusion that their music will make their names irrelevant. All I’m asking is that they try.
Fun to say.
Gives me the visual of vampires throwing a huge nighttime kegger. Bloody Mary anyone?
The “skilled storytellers?” I can get on board with that.
Kanye West has defended his late performance at Bonnaroo in his blog that was posted yesterday. West has received constant backlash from the media and his fans for performing at 4:30 a.m. which was approximately two hours late. In his blog he states:
“This Bonnaroo thing is the worst insult I’ve ever had in my life… THIS SHOWS NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY TO BE GOOD AT SOMETHING THERE WILL BE PEOPLE THERE TO LIE ABOUT YOU AND BRING YOU DOWN! I’M FUCKING HURT BY THIS ONE. ALL I CARE ABOUT ARE THE FANS. JUST SAY THIS OUT LOUD IN A ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE, “KANYE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT GIVING A GOOD PERFORMANCE.” CAN ANYONE HONESTLY SAY THAT ????????? ”
Some quick updates on goings-on for the past couple of days:
1) Caching is back up - We’ve reimplemented caching (finally) of your content via Sharkbyte. The benefits: you can travel anywhere and have your songs available for streaming, from any computer; bandwidth from your personal internet connection saved, as we’ll host future downloads for you (and you’ll still get compensated); and eventually moving all of the songs over into Grooveshark Lite and Tinysong, expanding the catalog of songs available by adding your own.
Everything’s looking pretty good so far, but if you see anything funky, be sure to let us know.
2) We got Ddos’ed! - For the past couple of early mornings, Grooveshark has been hit pretty hard by some mysterious zombie traffic. Fortunately, it’s only happening between about 2 AM and 7 AM EST, but between those hours things have been getting seriously slow. So for you nighthawks using Grooveshark while working (or playing) late, this is why–and we’re working on figuring out exactly what/who/why it’s happening.
3) Advertising? - You may have noticed small text ads appearing in the bottom footer of Grooveshark Lite. Don’t worry, we haven’t sold out to the man–we’re only selling small text ads to help support the dream: listening to whatever song you want, when you want.
If you hate it and philosophically resent us, let me know. On the other hand, if you’re interested in advertising on Grooveshark, hit us up! We’re more than happy to see what we can do for you.
That’s it so far this week! I’ll keep you posted on anything else that comes about, but until then, keep listening and keep in touch!
There’s something to be said about a person who writes a terrible song that inexplicably becomes a hit. It’s a phenomena that rivals Stonehenge in its inability to be explained. These songs that aspire to be eloquent love letters or political statements really just sound like the pompous ramblings of somebody who got WAY too famous. Yet, somehow these songs manage to resonate with sizable amount of people.
Photo Credit
Look, we’re not saying that the following musicians don’t have any talent. All we’re suggesting is that they’re lyrics are so unbelievably terrible that we can’t understand how anyone can justify listening to them. We also are well aware that Blender has already created this list. Big deal. The Black Crowes probably like this list better anyway.
In the days immediately following a breakup most people retreat into their music collection to find solace. Or their collection of finely aged scotch, but that’s beside point. Listening to unbearably depressing music after the dissolution of a relationship is a time honored tradition for misanthropes all over the world. There’s something cathartic about listening to some rock star describe the same emotions you’re experiencing. Of course, the “heart on their sleeve” is probably accompanied by a “big fat paycheck” that you wont be privy to, but that’s neither here nor there. They get you. You get them. You are brothers in arms.
It’s really rainy and miserable in Gainesville right now which means that there’s probably some kid lamenting a lost love and listening to The Smiths. This blog is for that kid, hypothetical or otherwise. Here is a list of The Best Breakup Albums to drown your sorrows in when you don’t have the luxury of a wine collection. Feel free to stream some of the tracks and revel in the sorrow.
Bob Dylan- Blood On The Tracks
Have a band, story, or question about Grooveshark? We want to hear it! Send it to:
marketing (at) grooveshark.com
| Grooveshark tracks the best users so you know who can be trusted to deliver quality content. |
| In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. |
| Free streaming. Social networking. Music discovery. Oh, and reimbursement for sharing when somebody buys a song that you've uploaded to the collective. |
| If you're looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you're depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help. |
| Grooveshark: a new music service that I can see a lot of potential in. |
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