If the previous months were crazy then July has been crazier. The app has crossed the 10K unique users per day mark and currently the traffic seems to be in that range. I hope the growth continues and my target is to get 1 million uniques every month. This can only happen if you, the users of JustUnfollow help in spreading the word about the app. Tell all your friends about it, let them know there is an easier way to unfollow non-followers and follow fans!

In my previous post I had mentioned about Premium accounts for JustUnfollow. I'm still working on it and hopefully in the next few days I'll make an announcement on this blog. At the moment, I've decided to price it at $4.95 per year. With the Premium account you will get unlimited unfollows and follows. What do you think about it?

It's been six months now and my feelings for the decisions I made are mixed. The appengine has its advantages as well as disadvantages. I've faced a lot of issues due to GAE's datastore coping with the high usage it gets from all the folks who have their apps running on it. 

Well, this post isn't about GAE's issues, I'm writing this for a different reason. When I developed JustUnfollow, I made use of sharded counters for stats. A few days back, I could see a lot of errors in my log and on inspecting realized the errors were all about DataStore writes. Maximum writes to the datastore were failing. I've disabled stats for now, but I'm trying to figure out what the problem is. The reason for failure is most likely the number of requests that are being made now. My shards need to be incremented around 5 to 8 times per second. I thought the sharded counters would be able to handle this, but seems like I was wrong.

What I'm going to do now is increase the number of shards from the current 25 to 100. I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do, if the number of shards I'm using are low, just right or too much. If any of you have any idea please let me know about it.

-Nischal

I will keep you updated as soon as things start work fine.

Frankly, none of the twitter apps that use twitter to authenticate users will be working as of now. I'll update this post as soon as twitter oAuth is up and running again. You can check the status directly on twitter's status site as well - Twitter Status