The WebTranslateIt Blog

Yesterday I commissioned and successfully moved Web Translate It to a bigger server. The move went smoothly and without any downtime.

Web Translate It was hosted on a server slice from Linode since December 2009. While I’ve always been happy with Linode’s service, one big bottleneck of server slices is disk I/O because the hard disk is shared with other customers. Web Translate It uses a lot of disk I/O for reading/writing language files or accessing the database, so it is really beneficial for us to move to a dedicated server.

Besides, we were using pretty much all the memory on the slice and it was soon time to switch to something bigger. I find slices with more than 4GB of RAM too pricey compared to what dedicated servers have to offer.

I ordered a new dedicated server from DigitalOne (this is also where the newly famous Pinboard.in is hosted). The new server has roughly the same specs than our old slice (1x quad core Xeon), but with a much faster and dedicated hard drive and 16GB of memory (instead of 2,5GB previously).

I started migrating the service to the new host early yesterday morning. Around 8AM GMT the master database server was moved to the new host, without any downtime. I spent a fair amount of time setting back up the server monitoring and the database replication server, which duplicates in real time the data streamed from the master database server. Later in the afternoon I switched the DNS to point webtranslateit.com to the new host so the new server could handle the web traffic.

I’m really happy with the new server’s performance so far. Intensive disk operations such as importing/exporting/updating language files are really much faster now.

I’m also currently working on other improvements to speed things up. I hope to be able to release these changes next week.

Thank you for using Web Translate It.

Link: mashpie/i18n-node on Github
i18n-node is an i18n library for node.js apps. It generates .json language files that are compatible with Web Translate It’s JSON parser.

From the documentation:

i18n-node is a lightweight simple translation module with dynamic json storage. Uses common __('...') syntax in app and templates.

Stores language files in json files compatible to webtranslateit json format. Adds new strings on-the-fly when first used in your app. No extra parsing needed.

Link: A workflow for translations on Mynewsdesk Devcorner
MyNewsDesk on using Web Translate It for their translations:

As Mynewsdesk is moving into new markets, our internationalization (i18n) efforts have been stepped up a notch. Rails has pretty good i18n support, but maintenance becomes painful when projects scale up [insert “rails can’t scale” joke]. A better translation process was a big itch to scratch for us.

After exploring a few online translation tools, we settled on WebTranslateIt.com. It has a nice GUI and user friendly documentation. Our translation files took a while to import, but the payoff was immediate: graphs and stats on how up to date our translations are.

Read more at MyNewsDesk dev corner.

Web Translate It’s Project API endpoint now serve a new attribute: the language file checksum, generated by SHA-1.

The new version of the web_translate_it gem use file checksums to check if the language files need to be pulled or not. It used to compare the timestamp of the local file’s last modification against the timestamp of last modification served by Web Translate It, but comparing file checksums is much more reliable and should fix a few issues a few customers were having.

Upgrade

To upgrade the web_translate_it gem to its latest version, type in a terminal: gem install web_translate_it.

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We’re currently processing the checksum for each of the 58,000 language files hosted on Web Translate It and it is taking a while. The file checksum might not be available for the endpoint for your project yet, but it’s coming really soon.

Web Translate It will be unavailable for a about an hour on Saturday, April 16th, 7:00 UTC as we will release an important update to the service. The downtime won’t exceed 1 hour.

This downtime is needed to improve Web Translate It’s architecture in order to deliver new features, as well as improving the service’s performance.

In order to do this, we need to migrate some of the data hosted on Web Translate It to a new architecture. We have a lot of data, and we estimate migrating the 6.1 million strings to the new architecture to take about 45 minutes.

This upgrade will bring interesting new features, such as locales subclassing (for instance en-US is a sub-locale of en), as well as allowing the creation of custom locales for a specific territory or use-case (you will be able to create locales such as en_GB_Singapore_Event or en_Pirate or anything you like). More information about these features will be announced later.

As always, you should follow @webtranslateit on Twitter for live updates.

EDIT 14th April: The maintenance window planned next saturday is cancelled.