JoeUser Tech

Pain

Published on February 18, 2006 By Draginol In Blogging

JoeUser.com is a pretty popular site. Ranked in the top 20,000 websites worldwide, it gets a decent chunk of traffic. But compared to some of our other sites, it's a drop in the bucket.

We had the site down today as we tried to narrow down what was eating up our database bandwidth. Answer: JoeUser.

This Spring we're going to have to revisit how JoeUser is coded and figure out why it's so intensive. Part of it has to do with how database driven it is. The content you are seeing on most of the pages has been custom tailored for you.

Even though a given page will appear the same for 99.9% of the userbase, the underlying system supports pages that are different depending on who is looking at them.

You can have blogs, for instance, that only some people can see (i.e. custom audiences). There's a whole bunch of things like that that are just very database intensive. Some of which really isn't used (like custom audiences are rarely used -- though I shouldn't say that because even admins can't see private blogs, they're well private so maybe people are using them a lot and I just don't know).

Sorry we had the site down so long today.

Comments

ParaTed2k

on Feb 18, 2006

Thanks for the explanation, Brad. I'll admit, it came at kind of an inconvenient time for some of my own blog promoting activities, but you and the rest have well proven that when JoeUser is down there is a very good reason for it. I'm just glad there is enough interest at Stardock in JoeUser that you are willing to give up valuable man hours to keep it working as smoothly as it does.

Thanks again!

Draginol

on Feb 18, 2006

If we can hire more web developers, that's what's relaly holding us back tehse days. We actually have the budget.

We just lack the people internally.

Danny Bassette

on Feb 18, 2006

Thanks for the information. Your hard work is appreciated.

Sly But Shy 1958

on Feb 18, 2006

Thanks for the info. Thanks for hosting us...

bakerstreet

on Feb 18, 2006

Thanks for the work. Not nagging, just letting you know that there are some of us ready to help support the site when you get the pro-level membership thing together.

BlueDev

on Feb 18, 2006

Thanks for the heads up and especially for this service.

Draginol

on Feb 18, 2006

Yea the main thing we gotta do is just get more programmers. The technology on JU is ahead of its time. In 10 years, we'll take for granted websites that custom tailor their stuff for each individual reader on the fly). The bummer is that we have that overhead but aren't using it very much.

Using the point system, the site could be set up so that users picked their preferences and the various pages they see would be based on the most popular/most well liked articles in the categories they the want to see. The database lookups have this overhead to support it, we're just not making use of it.

Gideon MacLeish

on Feb 19, 2006

I'm still chomping at the bit for a premium site, Brad. If you ever want to start a thread for brainstorming ideas for how to make a premium site worth the cost, I'd be willing to toss in my two cents. I think if you could do that, JU would quickly become another product of Stardock, rather than just a part of the website, and you could hire people separately to deal with the pain. Obviously the popularity is there to make a premium site feasible.

Again, just my two cents.

Trudygolightly

on Feb 19, 2006

Thanks for telling us, I thought maybe it was my own puter, at first anyway

I appreciate all you do for us

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!