ERP integration, staging server, SMTP issues, robots.txt, GAE

Post date: Sep 7, 2011 4:34:49 PM

• Wrote bidirectional ERP integration / data converter using Python 3, SQlite and XML input/output files & streams. Surprisingly it's much faster than most of our similar .NET implementations. I guess the key is a few optimizations I have used. I only parse XML data to objects when it's absolutely required. Otherwise I just handle those as regular strings. All basic processing, reads and updates are done in single transaction. Of course it forces to running only one process&thread. But doing so is a lot faster than committing data in smaller chunks. This is also best solution when considering overall performance.
• sl.sami-lehtinen.net my Debian based VPS test server @ Hetzner. Unfortunately all projects running on it are still under wraps.
• Explained to spamgourmet users why persisting situation of running out SMTP sessions is very bad thing in general. Also in case of primary mx outages having backup MX server is vital. Otherwise email gets lost very easily due to retry expire. Many mail servers won't try to deliver email for over 24 hours nowadays. Back in old good times many servers tried to deliver up to 7 days.
• Wondered why robots.txt @ jottit.com is literally full of nonsense. They deliver binary data as robots.txt, it's pretty strange. Actually it turns out to be their favicon.ico file. Which is delivered even when robots.txt is requested. - FAIL! - I did inform administrators about this too. Let's see how fast they can fix it.
• Played more with GAE and released new version of 9ox.net URL shortener. I never thought that I could learn so much by writing such a simple test application. GAE's database sets interesting limits, transactions are restricted and memcache caching plays big role. It's very important to keep these things in mind when designing application for such a platform.