Category Archives: Web Development

Software Circuit Breakers in Ruby

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I found an interesting article in this week’s Ruby Weekly newsletter—a post from Martin Fowler about the circuit breaker concept in Ruby.

The idea is pretty simple, but pretty slick: wrap calls to external services that can fail in a ‘circuit breaker’, which will detect when the call is failing (or acting particularly slow) and short-circuit calls. In the simplest case, this can help avoid slow-downs when a non-critical remote service fails. For example, if you normally made an inline call to send a welcome email to new signups, you might fall back to just enqueuing the task if the mailserver call slows down—or perhaps just take them to a webpage with the same content.

In the best case, this can prevent cascading failures. Webpages make a blocking call to an external service, which goes down, thus filling up the queue of available application servers, thus leading to a service outage.

Background Jobs in WordPress

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In building an interactive site that, well, isn’t horribly slow, you frequently want to schedule background jobs, or queue asynchronous tasks, that should be run, but not right away. For example, if a user signs up and you want to send them a welcome email, you don’t necessarily want to do it while the page is rendering for the user, because if it takes a moment, it would slow things down. Spam checks, updating a search index, and so on might fall into the same category.

I’m starting to tinker with a half-baked idea for a WordPress plugin, and spent a while searching for how to do this. As best as I can tell, WordPress doesn’t provide a background worker per se. But it has a related concept that may suit your needs — the wp-cron system, particularly wp_schedule_event. (But check out all the wp-cron functions.)

Unlike a background worker that’s always running to pick up new tasks off the queue, wp-cron is a bit different. It appears that it can literally be invoked by cron on a *n.x system, or it can be woken up by page visits if it’s “time” for a scheduled event. I haven’t delved into it enough yet to be sure, but I suspect it wouldn’t be good for things where you assume that “queuing” them will almost-instantly run them. (Though that’s not really a safe assumption to make even for always-on background workers.) But if time isn’t quite of the essence, this may work very well.

Cool Link Roundup

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A bunch o’ interesting links I’ve happened across recently:

Proportional Image Scaling in CSS

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While you should always use the appropriately-sized images on websites (rather than serving 10-megapixel images on your pages — people actually do that!), when dealing with dynamic content, sometimes it’s nice to ensure that images don’t expand beyond their container.

That’s easily solved with setting a max-width value in the CSS on my other blog, but the problem was that this seemed to only adjust the width. I wanted to scale images proportionally, so if an image that was too big made it through, it wouldn’t look awful.

It turned out to have a really easy fix — but it was astonishingly hard to find information on. Here’s the fix:


img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height: auto;
}

The “height: auto” is the key, making height proporational when it is resized. (The “100%” in max-width gets interpreted as 100% of the element it’s contained in, not 100% of the image itself.)