So about that Google Reader replacement app I mentioned last time… It’s been over three months since I wrote the last post, and I learned quite a bit about scalability and relational database performance since then.
While grr did fine for a while initially, after a while it became painfully obvious why relational databases perform so poorly with quickly growing data. As the application’s storage footprint grew, application navigation started becoming more and more sluggish – switching subscriptions sometimes would take 3 to 6 seconds (in all fairness, the database is on a shared host), and after spending several weeks attempting to optimize data queries, I decided that the undertaking was probably futile.
So I decided to do something that a friend of mine recommended I do all along – write a feed reader for Google App Engine. Somewhat encouraged by the success of goread.io and using bits from grr’s concurrent updater and client-side code, a little less than two months later, the result is Gofr - a feed reader for the cloud, written in Go.
A live version of the app is available at http://www.gofr.io/, with the source code hosted at GitHub. Since service currently costs me very little, registration is free – at least for the time being.