Searching with Picky: Live Parameters Part 1 Tweet
This is a post in the Picky series on its workings. If you haven’t tried it yet, do so in the Getting Started section. It’s quick and painless :)
This time I want to do a two-part post on live parameters.
What are Live Parameters?
Imagine this situation:
You are sitting at your desk. A few levels below is an array of Picky servers, contentedly humming at a bagillion requests per second…
Ok, this is actually a fantasy of mine, but bear with me.
Suddenly, your boss enters, his hair pointier than ever!
He tells you that a customer’s space bar is not working anymore and now he’d like to use the comma , character to designate where words are separated.
Of course you roll your eyes, but he doesn’t give up. The customer needs to be served, no matter what!
At this point, what would be really good to have is a way of changing Picky’s behaviour with splitting words in queries.
(Btw, the splits_text_on option, a regexp, defines how picky splits text into tokens, or words.)
And you do, but: What you have to do now is change the config, deploy, restart the whole cluster (or send Unicorn the HUP signal to have it restart), losing a fantastic amount of CPU cycles that would have been better used for searching with Picky.
This would be called changing lame parameters. Live parameters are the cool counterpart of lame parameters, the ones with hair, a sunny disposition, having that certain je-ne-sais-quoi that only surfers have.
Live parameters are parameters that can be changed hot – in the running server.
Now wouldn’t that be nice? Turns out it isn’t as easy as I thought.
How do I achieve this?
The problem is that the Unicorn master – or with any multiprocessing-based server – holds the original copy of the configuration. You can easily update it in a child, but if the child dies, it will be replaced with a new one which has forgotten everything.
So let’s call this thing that updates the configuration a Suckerfish. Suckerfishes – or Remoras – attach to a host (Fig. A), mostly sharks, by sucking onto them. This suckerfish (in the form of a request) would attach itself to a child, and from there open a channel, a pipe, to the master, where it could update the master config.
So after attaching itself, this fish would then whisper Picky sweet and golden nothings in its ear, causing it to update its master config.
That’s fine, but where can I try it?
Suckerfish is ready, but not release-ready yet. So you could clone picky, and call ./install in the top level directory to install all 1.3.0 gems locally.
But bear with me, for in part 2 (after the release of 1.3.0 and the picky-live gem, the “Suckerfish” gem) I’ll show how this can be done and how you can use Suckerfish as a weapon against pointy-haired bosses, or just for easy experimentation with your search parameters.
Don’t worry, it will get technical soon ;)
Next Searching with Picky: Live Parameters Part 2Share
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