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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View Comments
Awesome.
...and you're welcome. Obviously, this uptick in site traffic has to do with my serendipitous arrival.
Its all loading much much faster on my machine...
Thanks Frank. Whatever they pay you, its not enough....
Its working great. thanks for the hard work.
New drivetrain, cables and bartape. Everything all lubed up and ready for spring.
Nice one, Frank. You're a great road captain.
Great stuff, it certainly seems better this side of the Atlantic!
Frank I'm reporting big improvement in Europe.Fast as hell man! Your hard work is appreciated.
It is hard to imagine this site without you Frank... Gianni running things would quickly lead to anarchy, Brett would yell at everyone (I can safely say this because we live on opposite sides of the world and have never met and never will) and the rest of the crew would instigate endless looping discussions of beer. So good on you and keep up with the OCD work that only you find scintillating - thank god.
And wholly shite that WAS fast!!!
Quicker than the Festina team up L'alpe on my iPhone as well.
If the site is JvS's tire, you're JvS himself powering on for the win (and a hottie) despite the fact that the best riders in the world are not far behind.