Who says Application Express can't scale?

Over a year ago, I wrote about who is using Oracle Application Express on http://apex.oracle.com. At the time, I included some weekly statistics.

During our team meetings every week, I report on the overall usage of http://apex.oracle.com. I just wanted to report on some astounding numbers:

Total Page Views Distinct Applications Distinct Users
---------------- --------------------- --------------
       6225566                  3268           2778


Total Workspaces
----------------
         11643


Total Applications
------------------
           39849


Workspaces Approved
-------------------
              316

That's 6,225,566 page views in the past week, and this is still running on the same Dell PowerEdge 1950.

Now granted - the ability to sustain this type of load throughout the week deserves some credit to Kris Rice, who spent a fair amount of time analyzing Application Express on apex.oracle.com and identifying some major problem areas in performance. As well, he brought in some experts to perform OS tuning. The recent purge on apex.oracle.com removed close to 10,000 workspaces, schemas, tablespaces and datafiles. Lastly, a couple months ago, I implemented a Resource Manager plan which prevents someone from monopolizing the entire server. I'll be presenting a detailed discussion of Resource Manager and apex.oracle.com at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009.

A large number of these page views are from the bots of Search Engines, especially since ProMED Mail is run on apex.oracle.com. But a page view and execution of the engine is a page view and execution of the engine. All in all, that's a large load on a relatively cheap piece of hardware.

OraTweet - Micro-blogging with Oracle Application Express

About a year ago, Carl Backstrom was telling me how he was helping another gentleman in Oracle, Noel Portugal from the CRM On Demand team, with a micro-blogging site developed with Oracle Application Express. Carl game me a demonstration of OraTweet, tried to explain Twitter, tweets, and micro-blogging. I just didn't get it, at the time.

Today, micro-blogging appears to be all the rage. Dwight Howard from the Orlando Magic basketball team is on Twitter. CNBC's Fast Money television show is on Twitter. I am even on Twitter, but I really don't use it, as you can tell.

Noel's application, OraTweet, has been in use within Oracle for the past year. As Noel states on the oratweet.com site: "Teams around Oracle are finding ways to communicate with their teams while reducing email overload. The results have been amazing. Global team members are connecting and sharing information. Users have started to develop stand alone clients to consume OraTweet’s timeline. We have also integrated the OraTweet timeline to Oracle Connect, our own internal social network. Overall information is flowing faster in a lightweight format."

Noel Portugal has developed an excellent Web site which explains OraTweet, lets you submit feedback, and provides a link to download the entire source code for OraTweet: http://oratweet.com/