§ Translator Contents

I have been trying hard to update all of our existing customers with the latest version of Translator Plugin Pro. It is a hard and time consuming effort (and without any remuneration).

There are essentially two challenges to this. First of all the batch processing script used to create a customized version is doing something very strange. For the first processing it is taking around 1 minute 10 seconds, for each subsequent processing the time is increasing in an arithmetic progression; 30-34 seconds each time. So the second client is processed in 1 minute 40 second , the third in 2 minute 25 second and so on. The code looks fine. I wonder through whether PHP does automatic garbage collection like java. In any case memory isn't increasing significantly. CPU is heating up but not appreciably. I still don't understand the cause of this delay. Also after one batch is run the subsequent batch picks up from where it ended last time + 30-34 seconds. In some situations the counter resets. But I haven't been able to consistently reproduce it. Any ideas as to what could be causing this?
Update: I have found and fixed the problem. It is related to a third party library we were using for processing the file.

The second challenge is customization. Several customer have come with small requests of customization down the road which we have done for them, often free. However it becomes a royal pain to find out the requests from email search in MS Outlook. It is possible, despite my best and laborious effort at accuracy, that I may miss someone's customization or even sending an update. So please don't hesitate to contact me if you do not find your update by wednesday or you think we have missed your existing customization. Please be patient. I am trying my best to esnure everyone receives their upgrade.

This update is a wakeup call for full automation. I am already designing a database (inhouse; not exposed to the internet) for storing the customer and order details which we will use to fully automate future upgrades. Also we will need to distribute the upgrade scripts to different machines. I will either use Condor as this is ideally suited for it or develop a custom java based distributed batch processing software. Any suggestions are welcome. However it is easier said than done considering our tightly packed product development schedule till December 2007.

Update: The final batch of updates have been scheduled for processing. I will do a final check tomorrow to see if I missed anyone. So if you don't hear by end of tomorrow, please speak up.