Improving Daily Emails

The daily notification email, which had been turned off for some time now due to a snag, has now been turned back on.

Previously, all the emails used to be sent at the turn of the day on the server. This was problematic in at least two ways.

• The load on the DB to sift through the large volume of errors to generate emails was turning out to be a bit much. The server had begun to protest about the load.
• All users got emails at the same time, irrespective of which timezone they belonged to. I would personally prefer to get my error notification in the morning when I'm starting my day, so that I can schedule time for fixing it. A mail that lands up in my mailbox when I'm about to go to bed is useless at best, and worrisome at worst.

Turns out, solving the latter problem solved the former problem as well, because the server load of sending out the email would get more-or-less evenly distributed across the entire day. So, taking inspiration from what Stride did recently, I've rolled out something similar for Errorception.

A small JS snippet notes your timezone every time you use Errorception. This timezone information is passed along to the server and recorded against your records. A cron kicks in every half hour on the server to determine if you should be sent an email to right now, based on whether it is 9:30 AM in your timezone, using the excellent 'time' module by Nathan Rajlich (TooTallNate). It just works!

So, starting about 15 mins ago, you should now receive emails at 9:30 in the morning, irrespective of which timezone you are in, or whether it's daylight savings or not. If you still aren't receiving emails, get in touch at rakeshpai at errorception dot com.

Almost forgot: Wish you a great 2013! Happy debugging!