We had a couple quick victories (we think) the last 2 days. We think we sorted a problem in subscriptions that was taking down the site about 2-3 times per hour. Nasty. We also tweaked some database configurations that seems to have sped up the site a noticeable amount. Yea for 43 Things!
Today we turned people’s feeds and subscriptions all back on, finished our work on images (which should all be loading now), and made a bit of headway on the 43Places problems tool. Hopefully we’ll add a new webserver this week as well. So much progress on Lickety Split.
Please go ahead and let us know about any problems you are seeing on the site. The more specific you can be the better. And of course, we love all the compliments and kind words. It is not as much fun to work on the backend of the site, but it makes it more gratifying when we hear how happy it makes you!
Categories: Announcements
We all had a list of suspects. Is the database only utilizing half its memory? Are aggressive spiders taking down the site? Is there a problem with the way Rails talks to FastCGI? But more than any other area of suspicion, we all knew there was something wrong going on with subscriptions.
So as a test, we turned off subscriptions around noon today. Guess what? The site perked up considerably. Errors dried up, the site stayed up, and “Oops” messages dropped down to a murmur (15 in the last 2 hours out of 105,000 page views).
We are going to monkey around with subscriptions a bit more, but it seems we may have found the greatest offender to site stability. If the site dies in the next few hours, it is probably us testing turning subscriptions back on. For now though, it looks like we got lucky right out of the gate.
What else is to come with Lickety Split? Fixing what ails the problems tool in 43 Places. Reworking the way we get rid of spammers and miscreants on the site. Getting subscriptions to be fast and painless. Lots of caching, some new hardware, some new site monitoring. We will keep going until the site is humming along reliably.
Categories: Announcements
About two months ago we started work on cupcake, our latest release of 43 Things. But in the middle of that release, about three weeks ago, it became clear we had a problem. The site was slowing down. Too many people were getting the dreaded “Oops!” page.
For the last few weeks, we’ve put aside any new development projects to focus on the site’s performance. We added new hardware. We’ve found some new staff to help with system administration. We’ve fixed lots of bugs. But unfortunately, we have not yet turned the corner. The site is still too slow and too many people are getting that “Oops!” message. So we decided to make it official, we are creating a new release called “Lickety Split” focused around ![]()
nothing other than making 43 Things fast and reliable. The whole co-op is now working on “Lickety Split” and we hope to soon have all the sites living up that name.
We’ll keep you appraised of the progress we are making. This week we’ll be adding a new server to help with the load of traffic we are getting. But we are also reworking old parts of the site to make them faster and more reliable. In the process, we may need to change a few things – but we think the result will be worth it.
We’d appreciate it if you keep letting us know about your experience with the site. It is always nice to hear some of the good along with the bad. Thanks for your support!
Categories: Announcements
