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.