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**Jerod Santo:** So that 15 minutes is gonna be moving, I think... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It will be moving, exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** As the industry pushes forward, it's gonna keep going lower and lower, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, what is it that -- does every git push, which is from local to presumably GitHub in our case (it could be another code host), is there a way to scrutinize, like "Oh, this is just \[unintelligible 00:50:24.19\] and CSS changing to make that deployment faster"? You know, like it was not involvin... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You're right. So the steps that we go through - they're always the same. We could make the pipeline smarter, in that for example if the code doesn't change, you don't need to run the tests. The tests themselves, they don't take long to run. But to run the tests, you need to get the dependencies. And w... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[52:09\] You effectively introduce a big cache invalidation problem. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's what you do. Cache invalidation is one of the hard things in computer science. So it's slow, but it's simple. It's like, "We'll just rebuild it every time." It's like, why does React re-render the entire DOM every time? Well, it doesn't anymore, because that was too slow, so it does all this diffi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** What I'm saying - there's small things you can do. You can get the 80% thing, and it works mostly; it doesn't squeeze out every performance, but it's a big -- so there's probably some low-hanging fruit we could do... But it's surprisingly complicated to do that kind of stuff. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And the first step really is trying to understand, these 15 minutes, first of all, how much they vary... Because as it says, sometimes they can take 20 minutes. Why does it vary by that much? Maybe, for example, it's test jobs being queued up in CircleCI. A lot of the time that happens, and they are q... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's why I said there's probably some low-hanging fruit, and we could probably do a little bit of recon and knock that down quite a bit. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And that's exactly why I'm thinking, use Honeycomb just to try and visualize those steps, what they are, how they work, and stuff like that... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[unintelligible 00:54:16.02\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** Good idea. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Second thing is -- and I think this can either be a managed PostgreSQL database, so that either CockroachDB or anyone that manages PostgreSQL, like one of our partners, one of our sponsors, I would like us to offload that problem... And we just get the metrics out of it, understand how well it behaves... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I remember slacking "How can our Postgres be out of memory?" It's like \[unintelligible 00:55:16.10\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, the replication got stuck, and it was broken, it just wouldn't resume, and the disk would fill up crazy. Crazy, crazy. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's the reason you would wanna use a \[unintelligible 00:55:31.02\] because they handle a lot of that stuff for you. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. And if it can be distributed, that means that we can run multiple instances of our app, was it not for the next point, which is an S3 object store for all the media assets, instead of local disk. Right now when we restore from backups, that's actually what takes the most time, because we have... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[56:09\] Putting all of our assets into S3 would be like "Welcome to the 2000's, guys." |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would be, right? \[laughter\] This is exactly right, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** "You've now left the '90s..." Maybe I should explain why we're using local storage. Some of it is actually just technical debt. This was a decision I made when building the platform back in 2015, around how we handle uploads. Not image uploads, but mp3 uploads... Which is one of the major things that w... |
So because of that reason, and because I was new to Elixir and I didn't know exactly the best way to do it in the cloud, I just said "Let's keep it simple. We're just gonna upload the files to the local disk." We had a big VPS with a big disk on it, and were like "Don't complicate things." So that's what we did. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:57:34.07\] |
**Jerod Santo:** And know full well -- I mean, even back then I had done client work where I would put their assets on S3. It was just because this mp3 thing and the ID3, we ran FFmpeg against it, and like "How do you that in the cloud?" etc. So that was the initial decision-making, and we've been kind of bumping up ag... |
So as part of this "Well, let's put our assets on S3" thing, I'm like "Let's replace Arc when we're doing this, because I don't want to retro-fit Arc." It does support S3 uploads, but the way it goes about shelling out for the post-processing stuff, it's kind of wonky, and I don't totally trust it... So I would want to... |
So it's kind of like that, where it's slightly a bigger job than reconfiguring Arc just to push to S3, and doing one upload and being done with it. But it's definitely time... It's past time, so I'm with you. I think we'll do it. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. This just basically highlights the importance of discussion these improvements constantly. So stuff that keeps coming up, not once, but two years in a row - it's the stuff that really needs to change. Unless you do this constantly, you don't realize exactly wha... |
I think in this case, this S3 and the database, which is not managed, have the potential of unlocking so many things for us. Simplifying everything... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:00:11.09\] Well, the app becomes effectively stateless, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It does. How amazing is that...? |
**Jerod Santo:** And then you're basically in the cloud world, where you can just do whatever you want, and life is good. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's exactly it. |
**Jerod Santo:** And then face all new problems you didn't know existed. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** True. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Does this Arc thing also impact the chaptering stuff we've talked about in the past, Jerod? Wasn't that also part of it? |
**Jerod Santo:** There is an angle into that... So for the listeners, the chaptering -- so the mp3 spec... Actually, it's the ID3 version 2 spec, which is part of the way mp3's work - it's all about the headers - supports chaptering. ID3 v1 does not. ID3 v1 is very simple. It's like a fixed frame kind of a thing... And... |
Unfortunately, there's not an ID3v2 Elixir library, and the way that we do our ID3 tags right now, by way of Arc, is with FFmpeg. So we shell out FFmpeg, and we tell FFmpeg what to do to the mp3 file, and it does all the ID3 magic, and then we take it from there. |
So the idea was - well, if we could not depend on FFmpeg, first of all, that simplifies our deploys, because we don't have a dependency that's like a Linux binary \[unintelligible 01:01:39.05\] But we'd be able to also do chaptering, so we'd get some features, as well as simplify the setup. And that is only partially t... |
So the fact that it doesn't exist in FFmpeg, which - if you've ever seen, it's one of the most feature-full tools in the world. I mean, FFmpeg is an amazing piece of software, that does so many things... But it doesn't support mp3 chaptering. So it's kind of a slightly related, but different initiative that I've also n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just wondering if we had to bite the Arc tail off, or whatever that might seem like, to also get a win, along with that... And the win we've wanted for years essentially was being able to bake in some sort of chaptering maker into the CMS backend, so that we can display those on page, as you sai... |
**Jerod Santo:** Totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And for obvious reasons, that Jerod has mentioned, that's why we haven't done it. It's not because we don't want to, it's because we haven't technically been able to. So if this made us bite that off, then it could provide some team motivation... Like, we get this feature too, and we get this statel... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And one way I thought that we could tackle that, which doesn't work with our current setup, is we could -- I mean, we render the mp3's or we mix down the mp3's locally on our machines, then we upload them to the site... We could pre-process the chapters locally. We could add the chapters locally ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[01:04:06.29\] As I was listening to you talking about this, one of the things that it reminded me of is the segments in YouTube video files, which sometimes I really like, because I can skip to specific topics really easily... So rather than having fixed beginning, middle and end, you can have topic... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's the feature right there. You use it however you wanna use it. The obvious way is like "Well, there's three segments. I'll put three chapters in." But if you were in charge of doing your own episode details and you could put the chapters in the way you would want to - yeah, you could make it real... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I would love that. |
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