I’m always happy to see successful projects that use AOLserver. I know John Buckman has been working hard on his latest creation, Bookmooch, a community for exchanging used books.
Tonight, a co-worker pointed out that this week’s TWiT Inside the Net episode 33 podcast is about Bookmooch! You can download the MP3 (18.4 MB) and listen for yourself. It’s a good show, but I’d like to just highlight a portion toward the end of the show.
At 30:53 (30m 53s) into the show, Leo Laporte asks John, “What did you write Bookmooch in, John?”
John responds, “Tcl,” which unsurprisingly resulted in a response of shock and disbelief from Leo and Megan Morrone. Then, John goes on to mention AOLserver at 31:30 and gives it a quick plug (thanks, John!).
Leo asks at 31:54, “You’re kind of swimming upstream, you’re not doing PHP, MySQL, all the traditional LAMP stuff?”
John responds at 32:00, “Magnatune is all PHP and MySQL and when we got Slashdotted I realized that it was not a very scalable platform. I’ve written some articles, one for Sysadmin Magazine, another one for Linux Journal, about surviving Slashdot, and it takes a lot of hardware if you want to scale, a lot of machines. The only way I could do Bookmooch and not charge is to do it on one or very few machines.”
He goes on to say at 32:39 that Bookmooch is powered by a single 1.2 GHz PC with a 120 GB drive supporting 280K hits a day. While this is a respectable amount of traffic, I’m betting that AOLserver isn’t even breaking a sweat, yet. It’ll be interesting to see how far John can push it before he needs to split traffic across two servers.
I’m really happy that John was able to get on TWiT and talk about Bookmooch, but I especially appreciate the fact that he gave AOLserver almost a full minute of his interview talking about it. I’m not sure how large TWiT’s Inside the Net podcast’s reach is, but I’m sure a lot more people have heard about AOLserver now that John’s mentioned it. Thanks again, John.
Update: Here’s John’s interview in Red Hat Magazine about Magnatune.
Tags:
John Buckman,
Bookmooch,
TWiT,
Inside the Net,
podcast,
AOLserver
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
Hey Dossy, I’m tickled you noticed the Aolserver/Tcl plug, and it’s absolutely true that the server is not breaking in a sweat yet, and can handle about 5x more usage before it becomes an issue. Note that every single web page at BookMooch is several database calls, so this quantity of hits is actually pretty significant, and LAMP would simply be crushed by it.
And of course, a huge THANK YOU for Aolserver and the fabulous work you and the others do to keep it current.
-john