New release :-)
Jan 28, 2013
by giles
We’ve just released a new version of PythonAnywhere. This is a scheduled release of a set of new features, and is not related to the weekend’s outages (which are still under investigation, hopefully we’ll have more information soon!).
The new stuff is:
- We’ve upgraded our Python 3 version from 3.2 to 3.3.
- Bugfix: if you quick-start a web2py app in a directory that is not ~/web2py, the admin password will now be correctly set.
- Improved UI on iPads – you can now hide the space that we reserve for the on-screen keyboard, which is useful if you’re using a Bluetooth keyboard, or are just monitoring a log file.
- New packages: R, RPy, gettext, geventhttpclient, npm (yes, that’s right – node.js on PythonAnywhere – you can’t run a node server yet though), PyStemmer, mysql.connector, asciidoc.
Thanks to all of the people who suggested these fixes, including marladarla7, pigeonflight, pwoolcoc, gebloom, djfinton, chanin, markstocks, jpic, ezamr, and Kernie_xvid.
Outages over the weekend
Jan 28, 2013
by giles
Over the last weekend we had three separate outages; it appears that something on one of our servers was rapidly increasing the memory it was using and took down the main PythonAnywhere website. The majority of our users websites were unaffected.
We’re investigating the problem and will post again with an update.
New release - more console stability improvements, unicode fix
Jan 9, 2013
by harry
Today’s new release features:
-
a fix to the file browser unicode bug. This was a regression whereby non-ascii characters in filenames caused problems. Shame on us! fixed now.
-
I’m counting chickens here, but we may have fixed one of our resource leaks, which means we should need to restart console servers less often. That should mean that your console sessions can stay live for longer
-
Improvements to load-balancing between console servers.
-
and finally, a bugfix that was causing errors in “Reload Web app”.
Thanks to everyone that’s been pestering/encouraging us to get these fixes and features in, and people who’ve reported bugs, including a2j, in4paschenko, btccharts, web2pyslices, lmsmodule , nim4n, SignumSol, viralto, hardsoft, xdanyelo, afinney, rudi, tanay009 + sansoftaus
Keep in touch!
WEBAPP ALL THE THINGS!
Dec 20, 2012
by harry
Well, it’s been weeks and weeks and weeks, but we’ve finally (finally) managed
to get a version of MULTIPLE WEBAPPS out.
This is a soft launch, so all you avid blog and forum readers are finding out
about it first. We’d love your feedback! Is it working OK? Can you break it?
What should we improve?
Read more…
Calling all LaTeX experts...
Dec 7, 2012
by harry
We’ve just released a new version of
PythonAnywhere which features a full suite of
LaTex executables, available for you to run, in a browser, in our Bash consoles.
We’ve been experimenting with this for a couple of weeks, and we’ve had people
in floods of gratitude, saying “YES! Never again will I have to install LaTeX!
Thank you thank you thank you!”.
So, perhaps it’s of use to other people out there, even outside the world of
Python?
Read more…
Faster file creation and saving
Nov 28, 2012
by hansel
Hi all,
We deployed a new version this morning. The visible changes are
- a speed up of file creation and file saving. This means that all of the most pressing issues around the file browser performance have now been fixed
- The Python mimetypes module now works correctly
Progress on multiple web apps is looking good. We are rewriting the last couple of ‘Quickstarts’ right now.
Cheers
Even-even-fasterer file browsing and editing, woo
Nov 21, 2012
by harry
We’ve just released a new version with some more improvements:
- browsing files a tad faster
- opening files for viewing + editing much faster
- saving files still slow
We’ve also added a few packages:
More improvements on their way - speeding up saving files is next, and we’re back to work on finishing multiple webapps, so hopefully that won’t be long either.
Keep your feedback and suggestions coming!
Faster file viewing
Nov 19, 2012
by giles
We’ve just pushed an updated version of PythonAnywhere! The biggest change this
time around is that browsing through directories in the “Files” tab is much
quicker.
Some background: in the older version of PythonAnywhere, every time you browsed
a directory, we launched a new process that ran inside your sandbox. This gave us
great security pretty much for free – as the file view was running in your
sandbox, it was certain that you couldn’t see anyone else’s files. The problem
was that as more and more people started using PythonAnywhere (yay!) more and
more processes were being launched, and it got slower and slower (boo!). So
we’ve had to bite the bullet and code our own secure sandboxed file browser.
The first cut of this, which just uses the new system for browsing directories,
is what we’ve just released. We’re also working on using the same technique for
viewing, saving and editing files – that’s coming soon.
There have also been a couple of minor tweaks: head
and ping
are now
available from Bash consoles, and user web applications can now accept requests
of 32kB, up from 4kB (which was too small for, in particular, web apps that
wanted to use OpenID).
New release - a first crack at scaling issues
Nov 9, 2012
by harry
Hi all,
As many of you know, we’ve been having some
scaling issues in the last week or so. This new release is our first
crack at addressing them.
Read more…
Performance issues: What the problem is and what we are doing about it
Nov 6, 2012
by hansel
Over the last couple of months our users have been noticing increasing
performance issues. I think the most noticeable one is browsing directories and
viewing files. Though the other problem is a slow down of console performance.
Read more…