Topic: What I've been doing lately.
Just wanted to give a little status update, since it would appear to anyone monitoring the forum that nothing seems to be going on.
For the past couple of weeks, since the switchover to the stub server, I've been mainly working on the main database - the one that keeps pretty much everything about users, channels, widgets, etc.
This database is quite large, and quite complicated - it took somewhat over a day just to import the dump file from the production server into a database on my local machine.
I then built a very simplified version of the production Rails application with all of the models, but none of the view and controller logic. I then simplified the dependency relationships and eliminated many of the Rails filters to stop them from generating "change" notifications that would normally be issued to devices,as well as system audit records, ratings recalculations, etc.
Since then, I've been running various scripts to trim the database - remove the remnants of dash user accounts, dash-specific channels and widgets, unverified accounts (typically created by spammers), throw away various stale analytics, and various other things.
Some of these scripts take literally *days* to run. Eliminating a user or widget record is an *extremely* expensive operation. My computer's fan has really been getting a workout.
The idea is to reduce the database to actual accounts for actual users with actual widgets running on actual registered devices, which should cut it down by a significant fraction.
There is *at least* another week to go on that. After that, there will be some schema changes to optimize certain tables and simplify the types of database requests needed to respond to devices. Some these tables, even after the trimming, still have millions of rows, so, again, that will take days to process.
One question one could logically ask is - why wasn't this done when Chumby was around? The answer is simple - we could not take the systems down for the days to weeks necessary for this type of cleanup.
Once this is done, I can start building the system back up and we can see where we are.
One caveat - there's a chance that some of these scripts might have been aggressive with regard to hunting down and destroying Sony accounts - if your first device was a dash, and you subsequently purchased a *real* chumby and registered it to the same account, there's a possibility that the account might have been destroyed. If so, you would have to create a new account and re-register your device. Hopefully, that will not affect too many people.