Anyone who has happened by Velominati this past week will know our site has been in a serious breach of Rule #5; we had a big uptick in traffic, and the site made like Van Summeren’s back tire. During this time, I’ve done everything I could think of from indiscriminately screaming at the computer screen, wall, or tech support to flinging wild Hail-Mary code updates against the wall in the hopes of a miracle fix. Sometimes it seemed a fix repaired the issue, when in reality it was just a lul in traffic and the site went right back to sucking again a few minutes later.
As a diagnosed Obsessive-Compulsive, let me tell you that this has not been a good stretch; when an inanimate object doesn’t do my bidding, my insides twist into a palpable rage. On the plus side, it forced me to make long-overdue site optimizations in order to squeegee every bit of performance out of these pages. I upgraded the database and went to sleep with the update scheduled to go live at midnight only to wake from dreams where I checked the site to find the same lackluster performance. Unable to sleep, I climbed out of bed only to find the same lackluster performance.
Finally, I had to face the fact that we’ve spent too long too near our server’s capacity. I chose the Red Pill and upgraded to a high-power server that (hopefully) can handle the load with ease. While I’ve certainly noticed some weirdness (and please let us know anything you notice yourself), I’ve been thrilled with the site’s performance so far, though our weekend traffic is always about half that of week days. Be that as it may, I’ve been having a blast today making some tweaks and just clicking on all the pages and basking in how quickly they come up.
A big thanks to everyone for their patience while we dealt with the slowness, to my fellow Keepers for keeping spirits up, and thanks to the Community for sticking around and posting despite the interminable waits for the pages to respond. We should be in good shape for the coming season. Cheers.
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sweet, i noticed the 400 replies on some threads were taking 2 weeks to come up...thought it was me.
glad to hear of the uptick in traffic, its a great gig here
Good news Frank! Popularity does have it's downsides... although for techies I am reasonably sure that a new server is sort of like a new bike, albeit a bit less sensual.
Awesome work, Frank, but can you also have the Rule 5 chat with British Telecom and Sky so that they sort out the pitiful shit that they describe as broadband in my neck of the woods. Top download speed 0.74mb/s, worst 0.19mb/s. Upload high of 0.38mb/s and low of 0.04mp/s
It's fucking flat round here so it's not like the internet has to do any climbing to get here.
Its like having a server with eight cores: bitchin' as shit.
From one of the V domestique's, all good on this side of the world. Can I get you another bidon mon capitan?
It's like a server with a mustache with tits?
This is faster than shit off a shovel. Good work Frank.
Or as our Canadian friends might say, "faster than greased moose poop".
@BrianG
In their best "Terrence and Philip" hinged head voice.
@Frank - excellent thank you! I thought was just extra sucking performance of the network at work; connections time out all the time due to the over the top filtering. Now I can productively decrease my productivity during the day!
g