Would what you're doing right now be possible using canvas on the client side?

On second thought, that might make things much more complicated / slow, you'd have to write something that allowed clients to send back processed results to speed things up for future searches by other users.

I wonder if there's any desire for something like http://maprejuice.com/, but easily applicable to any processing task that needs to happen in realtime * , as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

* But also support cached results.

PS If/when your no.de server crashes, do you have to push again to get it to restart? I was having this problem the other day — it's annoying to have to add a space to a file, commit and push just to restart the server.

Cool. I noticed you're using Joyent too. I'm just starting a personal project on my own no.de smartmachine I got a few months ago.