We’d like to apologize for the service interruptions that occurred yesterday. If you were in an event Wednesday afternoon you may have seen your video periodically freeze, and the site slow down.
We take reliability seriously here at Vokle, and we feel that the best way to let users know we’re serious about that is to be accountable to them. To that end, we’re providing a full breakdown of what happened yesterday, along with what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m going to split this into two parts, a short, non-technical description, and a longer, more technical one for those techies out there.
The Short of It
What essentially happened was a bug in our code caused a small portion of our users to bombard our servers with data, interrupting video service, and slowing down the site for everyone. We’ve since fixed the bug, and have implemented rate limits for our users, so if something like this happens in the future, those users get cut off from our service, instead of taking it down for everyone. In other words, we’ve limited the amount of damage a single computer, or group of computers can do.
A Full Breakdown
At 14:00 we noticed issues with some videos ‘freezing’ (their connections to our flash media servers were being dropped), and shortly thereafter the entire site went down for a few minutes. There were a number of large events happening at the time, and the video issues caused a large number of users to constantly refresh, pushing us over our web server capacity.
In short, the poor video experience caused people to flood our web servers. In that short period, we hit more than double our previous peak number of requests/second, exhausting our server capacity. We rapidly added more servers to mitigate the issue, unfortunately, by the time we scaled up, a large number of those users simply moved on from Vokle.
The core problem with regard to the video freezing however, was a small number of our clients inundating our servers with requests, crowding out legitimate users. We fixed this by rate limiting all clients, thus limiting the damage these bad clients could inflict.
Shortly after adding the rate limiting in video ‘freezing’ stopped, and load returned to normal. The process of troubleshooting the issue and fixing it took about 2 hours, during which we tried a few different things, and restarted a few different services, causing intermittent availability issues during this period.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Part of this was due to features we pushed earlier in the week, which you can read about here. We have however isolated the issue, and taken steps to ensure that problems of this precise nature won’t happen again, and thank you for your patience.
Over the last week VOKLE has pushed some exciting new features, fixed some annoying bugs and made your broadcasting experience even smoother. Here are a the fun things and fixes our CTO implemented:
* You can now see your event stats in the planner! See above for example
* Fixed the homepage event listing, so we only display truly live events
* Auto-refresh (if you edit an event title, for example, it gets updated live!)
* Improved network security (fixed some holes in the original design)
* Lowe latency for Hosts, Co-Hosts and Question askers (but don’t forget to hardwire in)
* No more dealing with the Hardware Wizard when joining an event as an Attendee
* Enhanced latency measurement tools for Power Penguin
* Upgraded our Wowza server for increased performance
* Rebuilt the Twitter and Facebook authorization
Hip hip hooray for Andrew for pushing these changes. Next to be released… recording! Thanks for being patient. Give us one or two weeks, and we can smooth out all the kinks for you. Happy broadcasting!
Hello Vokle community! My name is Joel and I’m the freshest addition to the Vokle team.
Who am I? I’m a California native, a beach boy who grew up right down the coast from the Santa Monica headquarters of Vokle, raised on sunshine, Laker basketball and In-N-Out double doubles. I’m a Babson College student, weathered and calloused by cold winters and Boston Celtics fans. I’m a former Londoner, a world traveler with a palate for global cuisine. I’m an entrepreneur, a designer, a writer, an athlete, and most recently, a Vokleite.
As an advocate for creative expression and young, passionate start-ups my attraction to Vokle was natural. Vokle is about empowering people with a voice. For me, it has given me the creative outlet I crave for. I look forward to working with Vokle to strengthen and expand our community, so that more people out there can find their voice.
In short, if Vokle started out as a whisper, I hope to help it grow into a resounding roar.
Many users ask about shooting from an external angle, but are worried about Flash compatibility. For you fancy folks who want to use a camcorder to achieve that professional-look, you’ll find many consumer-level video USB and firewire cameras work fine with Flash.
If, however, Flash is having trouble accessing your external camera, we’ve stumbled upon a plugin for Macs that works miracles. A webcam driver called Macam has a plugin that helps your computer recognize a wider variety of cameras. Macam helped VOKLE out in a pinch during an important interview with Cindy Crawford.(even though she looks great from any angle):
For a semi-professional format on a PC, we recommend DVCAM.
If reliability is what you’re seeking in a broadcast, we recommend using your built-in webcam or a standard netcam for greatest most ease-of-use. If you’re looking to purchase a webcam, we recommend several compatible ones here.
Never forget the golden rule: no matter what your camera situation is, always, always test your camera and mic before you go live. Happy broadcasting!
Here is a brief Twitter-based Tale to demonstrate how a little start-up named VOKLE was neck-and-neck with a giant called Ustream.
There was once a youtuber named MattsMacintosh, seeking to go live in the land of Live Streaming. So he reached out to his people:
At this point, the race is split: eight for Ustream and eight for VOKLE (our tweet is not included in that vote), and MattsMacintosh makes his decision.
In this age-old battle, Goliath was chosen over David, but the underdog put up a courageous fight. After MattsMacintosh went live on Ustream, VOKLE got an additional three votes.
Total Tally: Ustream 8, VOKLE 11
All things considered, the VOKLE team is extremely proud that in this random pool of youtubers, VOKLE stood up against the almighty Goliath. Thanks to our users for providing the foundation of our live-streaming powers. We grow stronger every day, and we’ve been sharpening our slingshot for our next encounter with a giant
My name’s Nelson, and I’ll be contributing to the VOKLE blog here and there. Just a little bit about myself, I recently moved to the Los Angeles region from Washington, D.C. and am ecstatic to team up with VOKLE!
I graduated high-school in 2008 with the hopes and dreams of becoming a novelist and a short story writer. I attended College of Santa Fe with the plans of majoring in Creative Writing but was soon thrown a curveball when it was announced over Thanksgiving break that the college could no longer support itself financially. I then transferred to Goucher College in Towson, Maryland for two semesters before deciding to take off school all-together. It was at this time that I decided to follow my passion in songwriting (a passion I’ve had for five years) and just two weeks ago moved to Los Angeles to start a fresh page in my life, a decision that has proven to be the best decision I’ve ever made, as it led me to VOKLE. After reading the mission statement and viewing the VOKLE website, I was hooked and here I am!
In my pursuit to start a fresh adventure, the VOKLE team has not only been welcoming but also inspiring. To be around such visionaries and passionate persons is more than I could have asked for. I look forward to my work with VOKLE.
Howdy folks! In the last couple weeks, we’ve been hard at work on some fancy features which we can finally share with you guys. Here’s the scoop!:
1. Go Live Button
After hearing tons of feedback from our broadcasters for an ‘easy way to go live’, we’ve prioritized it high and just released it! Chances are you’ve noticed the new “Go Live” button on the top-right corner of your VOKLE webpage. Upon clicking, a pop-up will appear letting you create an event for a specific Lineup, or allowing you to create a new one. This feature will help you quickly create an event on-the-fly without dealing with Scheduling anything!
2. Staff Picks Leaderboard
We’re all super excited about this. As VOKLE continues growing, it’s become essential to promote our best content to our Frontpage. What you’ll notice is essentially a Leaderboard of our Staff Picks which is sorted in Most Viewed. Not only is this an awesome way to promote our best broadcasters, but also a way for you to grow your audience! Keep in mind, this updates every 2 weeks!
3. Consolidated Commenting
We’ve also implemented a little change to Commenting. So right now, people can comment on Lineup pages, and Event pages. We’ve brought both systems together so that you can now comment only on people’s Lineup page (think of it as a ‘Channel Shoutbox’). This will give commenting much greater focus!
There ya go people, what are your thoughts? As always, keep the suggestions and feedback coming via the comments!
On March 26-27th, YouTubers across the country united in Orlando for Playlist Live. Many Youtube Partners, including Freddie Wong, SwiftKarateChop and Mike Lombardo swung by the VOKLE booth and partook in nerf-gun knock-outs of Ustream (Uncool and Unoriginal VOKLE competitor).
Watch the Youtubers take down their target, plus a couple other playful Playlist moments:
Last week, VOKLE helped break a world record raise money for a vital cause. Over the period of 24 hours, Twestival held a continuous broadcast that covered charity events held in over 150 cities across the world. The event shattered the world record for the most charities supported through one live broadcast, and brought focus to local causes while raising funds for Save the Children’s Japan mission.
You can also check out the Twestival website, and find out how to donate some much-needed aid to Japan. Over the last three years Twestival has raised over a million dollars in charitable funding, and VOKLE is proud we could help connect such worthy causes across the world.
Today actress Marlo Thomas scheduled an interview with celebrity rehab doctor and Loveline host Dr. Drew, for her webseries “Mondays with Marlo.” However, Marlo needed to be in New York, while Dr. Drew was working with patients in Southern California.
So this morning Marlo directed audience questions to Dr. Drew from the comfort of her Manhattan office, and Dr. Drew discussed everything from substance addiction to teenage sexuality without having to leave the rehab center. VOKLE to the rescue!
