The Blog: March 2011
Ensuring balanced reads with PyMongo
Over the past year we’ve been evaluating and migrating many of our game services over to mongoDB. Its feature set gives us complete freedom to iterate with developers during game production, its performance is sufficient to power our infrastructure during peak load, our operations team appreciate its powerful administration tools, and 10gen has so far proven itself a reliable technology partner and steward of the Mongo roadmap. One of the very important features of PyMongo that we have made use of is the MasterSlaveConnection, but it’s not without its caveats, one of those being that it does not guarantee you are balancing your reads across a replica set.
Chai, the simple Python mock
Here at Agora we take testing seriously, insisting that full test coverage always be part of a deliverable and adjusting our schedules accordingly. We are historically a Rails shop, but for a few years we have been developing an extensive Python code base and infrastructure to power our in-game offerings.
We’ve been using Mox as our mock testing solution since 2009, and though it has met all of our functional requirements, we’ve longed for the simplicity and power of Ruby’s Mocha framework. This past Friday we held our 3rd Hack-A-Thon, and Vitaly Babiy and I developed Chai, a mocking framework patterned after Mocha.