Perl NOC

Looking for servers in Asia

We'd like to make some of the perl.org services (Search CPAN for example) faster for users in Asia; so we're looking for servers (Xen or KVM based servers are fine as long as we can run RHEL) in for example Japan, Taiwan or Singapore.

If you think you might be able to help, please email ask@perl.org.

search.cpan.org mirrors

Today search.cpan.org got a tiny slightly bit faster.  We're serving the CSS and images via the PantherExpress CDN, so in particular if you are in Asia/Australia or thereabout it'll all load a fraction or two of a second faster.

For the main site and search currently users in North America are served from Montréal (hosted by Weblocal), European users are served from London (hosted by Digital Craftsmen) and everyone else (most notably South America and Asia) are served from the perl.org servers in Los Angeles.

If you are in India or Japan I'd be curious to hear which mirror is "closer" network-wise to you, eu1.develooper.com or x17.develooper.com.

By the way, the countries visiting the site the most over the last ~5 months are in order the United States (34%), Germany (6%), United Kingdom (6%), Japan (5%), Canada (4%), France (4%), Russia (3%), China (2%), Australia (2%), Italy (1.5%), Netherlands (1.5%) and so on down the list.  Google Analytics says we have visitors from "228 countries/territories".  We're delighted by every one of them, especially the three visits from Antarctica.

Related module links on search.cpan.org

Documentation pages on search.cpan.org now contain a list of related modules. For an example see LWP::UserAgent

This list is determined by data created by Perlmonks.org about which modules are discussed together.

CPAN Search adds Gravatar icons

At the request of Michael G Schwern gravatar icons have been added to author pages on CPAN search.

Any author can get a gravatar icon on their page by registering at gravatar.com using their CPAN email alias.

New CPAN Search mirror(s)

One of the boxes serving CPAN Search to the US and the world has been about to fall over for a while (one of the disks hangs the system for a minute once in a while with scsi errors...).   We are working on setting up new a pair of load balanced (for redundancy) mirrors provided by YellowBot.

Ideally we'll get it setup so the DNS servers will check and notice when one of the mirrors are out too... (patches to pgeodns are welcome - we even have a wiki for it and other perl.org infrastructure things, send an email to get invited to it).

We could still use a well-connected box for CPAN Search in Asia -- it probably wouldn't get much traffic, but it'd decrease latency for users there.  Minimal specs required (it can be in a virtual box, vmware or xen): ~2.5GHz CPU, ~2GB ram, not much disk space, ability to install RHEL (we'll provide a license).

perl infrastructure news

Many visitors come here from the CPAN Search Site that we run with Graham Barr. They all end up on the CPAN Search News page, which doesn't get the regular updates that often does affect that site. Oops.

We do have more redundant mirrors of the search site than the rest of the infrastructure, but unplanned outages still affect it. So, if you are here for operational news regarding perl.org, be sure to check out the main weblog. :-)

CPAN / FUnet update

It's not something we (Robert, Graham & Ask) are in control of, but if you were wondering why search.cpan.org hasn't been getting new module uploads quickly lately it's because of problems with the hardware running the FUnet.fi master CPAN mirror.  It's making all of CPAN "not move" so to speak.

PAUSE is still running and taking uploads and no data is being lost anywhere, just a little delayed.

Last I heard it should get better sometime this week.

New search engine

For a long time Search CPAN has used the WAIT module to provide searching of POD documents. Today we started testing the use of Swish-e. Try it and let us know what you think

search.cpan.org Uploads RSS 1.0 feed

Many people have not been ablt to find the RSS feed for CPAN uploads that search has been providing for quite sometime. The only link was in the FAQ. It was also only in RSS 0.91 and did not contain much information.

Well now there is a new feed at http://search.cpan.org/uploads.rdf which is in the header of each page so discovery tools can find it. And there is a link on the recent upload page

EU search.cpan.org mirror live

I flipped the switch, so cpansearch.perl.org/search.cpan.org is now using the EU mirror for European users.

(see the search.cpan.org mirror post from yesterday)

Thanks again to Digital Craftsmen. We're also running one of our "geodns" thingies on their server now.