CPAN Testers has been growing by leaps and bounds lately and there have been some nice developments:
- Chris Williams recently gave his Rough Guide to CPAN Testing talk at the London Perl Workshop
- There were over 450,000 reports submitted in November, 2009 (only the second time this has happened)
- The six-millionth report was posted on November 23
Unfortunately, this success has come at a cost. The Perl NOC, which provides the backend for CPAN Testers, is now deluged with reports. Reports are sent via email, each of which gets run through spam scanning and then archived on a filesystem and made available via NNTP.
This might have seemed like a practical design when there were only a few tens of thousands of reports and only a few hundred new ones coming in each month, but it no longer scales to what CPAN Testers needs. Worse, it puts a strain on the NOC to keep everything else running while managing the growing volume.
I’ve posted an alert to the CPAN Testers discussion list asking people to throttle their smoke testers for a while. The Perl NOC has given us a deadline of March 1 to launch CPAN Testers 2.0 and get off email/NNTP once and for all.
In the new year, I’ll be posting more about a plan to make this happen.