I have to admit that I really like C#. The last 4 or 5 months, I’ve hardly touched any other programming language. And so it happened to be my first choice when I was asked to develop a “reasonably fast” logging server.
So what is this Octopus thing about? In a nutshell it’s a server, which takes HTTP requests with a defined set of URL parameters, confirms receipt the client, and then asynchronously stores the request into a database. The interesting bit is the part between accepting the request and storing it to the DB.
Basically, we’ve got three levels of storage: a in-memory queue, a flat file buffer, and the database. The tricky thing was to optimise processing, while still being fault-tolerant. I kind of managed that, I think. Octopus can (depending on the hardware it runs on) easily accept up to 2,000 requests per second, and will store them into either a MySQL or SQLite database at the moment. Please read more about it on the Octopus Website.
