Hardening the Gateways

This weekend, we installed a big enhancement to the gateway system. All of the protocols besides Google Talk have been on libpurple. Before today, we ran one instance of libpurple for all of the non-gtalk protocols (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ), and that was fine until fairly recently.

With hundreds of gateways active on LibraryH3lp nowadays, libpurple performance was taking a hit. So, Eric had broken the libpurple protocols apart so that now, each protocol has its very own instance of libpurple. This should mean a number of good things:

1. Performance should improve now that no single libpurple instance is running so many gateways.
2. When a protocol change at the source (like MSN) means that a gateway needs programming work, we can just go ahead and work on it right away without worrying about disrupting the other gateways.
3. When a gateway is having some problem, we can restart it independently from the others. Restarts aren't a big deal, but they do cause accounts to briefly flicker offline and online again.

Our libpurple gateway system has been open-sourced for a good while now, and this latest release has been updated at Eric's github.

Happy Valentine's Day!