A quick note to talk about what's been going on with swift since the diablo 
release.

Swift 1.4.2 was the openstack diablo release. Since then, we've had three 
releases. We've done quite a bit of small bug fixes and general polish, and I'd 
like to highlight some of the bigger improvements we've made.

First, we'e included a new tool in swift called swift-recon. This is a 
combination of a scripts and middleware for the object-server, and it allows 
the swift cluster to report on its own health. For example, using swift-recon, 
you can find out the disk utilization in the cluster, socket utilization, load 
stats, async pending stats, replication stats, and unmounted disks info. It's a 
great tool that gives you good insight into important metrics in your swift 
cluster. Florian Hines designed and wrote this tool.

On the bug-fixing front, we saw a memory leak error under high load at large 
scale. In short, the Python garbage collector was not always freeing memory 
associated with a socket when a client would disconnect early. This would cause 
the proxy servers to run out of memory after a few days of use. Greg Holt spent 
quite a bit of time finding and fixing this error.

We've also included two new tools for managing production clusters 
(swift-orphans and swift-oldies). These tools are used to find potential issues 
with long-running swift processes. These tools were written by Greg Holt.

That brings us to our current release. All of the above-mentioned changes are 
available in swift 1.4.5 (released earlier this week). I'd also like to 
highlight another exciting update that was just merged into swift today and 
will be included in the swift 1.4.6 release: temp urls and form uploading.

With this new feature, you will be able to craft a temporary URL that grants a 
user limited access to your swift account. For example, you can craft a URL to 
your swift cluster that grants PUT access to a particular container for the 
next 30 minutes. You can use this in conjunction with HTML forms to directly 
upload content from a browser into swift (without having to proxy the data on 
your web servers). This feature has been requested by many and was written 
primarily by Greg Holt with input from David Goetz and Greg Lange.

We're halfway through the openstack essex release cycle. I'm excited about the 
improvements we've made to swift, and I expect some more exciting things to 
come before our final essex release is made. As always, patches welcome!

John Dickinson
Swift Project Technical Lead
notmyname on IRC


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