jSuneido Goes Live

Almost three years after starting the project, the Java version of Suneido is now live in production. Last night one of my programmers switched our in-house accounting and customer support system over to jSuneido (thanks Kim). We have about 40 fairly heavy users so it's a good test.

We had a few minor problems today but for the most part it went quite smoothly. When I brought it up with several people they said they didn't notice anything different, which is what I want to hear. Several people thought it was faster. My own impression was mostly that it felt "smoother" - no annoying pauses like we've been running into lately.

(Honestly, I'm amazed that cSuneido manages to handle as many users as it does. When I designed it I never thought it would. It's definitely benefited from Moore's law.)

Our current server is only a dual core machine with 6 gb of memory. It doesn't really have enough cores or memory for jSuneido to take advantage of. We're in the process of getting a new i7 server with 8 cores (counting hyperthreading) and 24 gb of memory (thanks Dorlan). That should be a better platform for jSuneido.

One of the main goals of jSuneido was to scale better to handle larger systems with more users. For smaller systems cSuneido uses less resources. But it can't take advantage of 64 bit systems with large amounts of memory and multiple cores. jSuneido can.

Three years of work to reach this point. Not full time, but close to half my time. That's a lot of hours. It feels good to reach this point. No doubt there will be issues to deal with, but that's to be expected. In many ways it's just a transition between phases of the project. With climbing, reaching the top is only half the battle, the other half is getting down. With software, writing it is only half the battle, the other half is running, fixing, maintaining, and improving it.

This kind of project definitely requires being able to handle deferred gratification. But just as important is to take pleasure in the work itself, as well as in the end result. If I didn't enjoy the day to day programming (most days anyway!) there's no way I would do it for the relatively small amount of final gratification.  It's not like anyone really understands what you've done or what it took to get there. The external rewards just aren't enough to justify something like this. The process itself has to be sufficient reward. Any pats on the back at the end are just icing on the cake.

I'm deliberately making a point of marking this milestone. It's good to celebrate small victories along the way. Too often they slide by and with no punctuation it can seem like just one long slog. It must have been an even bigger milestone when the original version of Suneido first went into production, but I can't even remember it. I remember thinking that I would reward myself with one of the brand new flat screen monitors (that dates it!). But I never did, because it never seemed like I was "finished" - there was always as much road ahead of me as there was behind. Here's to the road ahead.