Jeremy Posted February 14, 2007 Share Posted February 14, 2007 The site has been performing a little better over the last few weeks, but today we had a short bout of "server too busy errors" and on Saturday there was an issue with one of the drives going sour causing disk errors. So, I figured I would provide an update on our ongoing quest for the scalable server. As I've indicated before, the site was originally built on hobby code (to put it lightly). Fortunately we're now at the point where we can bring in the Big Guns - or People Smarter than Us. These are the folks that have had a lot of experience with high-traffic web sites like ours. Of course the site itself, once a pretty basic site has now become an enormous Katamari ball, filled with just about every cobbled together feature. Although we have hired folks to work on the task the ball needs to be broken apart and examined to find out what needs to be fixed and what needs to be replaced. We've been in this process for the past 6-8 weeks now and we're currently running tests against suggested changes to make sure they, in fact, make a difference. Some of the changes can be pretty dramatic so things like losing accounts or deleting logs would be a Bad Thing. So we're being careful. We're also doing a lot of house cleaning - losing old tables we don't use and removing functionality that never made its way to the site. This will just make it easier in the coming months as we do more retooling for the site. Again, this is annoying to me far more than any of you can imagine. It's one of those things that have followed us around since the beginning and I will be happy to see the scalability issues go away. I assure you that the majority of our resources, both people and financial, are addressing this issue. I thank you again for your patience as we look for a permanent solution. Link to comment
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