What the heck is the deal with JoeUser?

Down up down up down up

Published on July 27, 2005 By Draginol In Blogging

JoeUser has been going up and down and up and down. What's the deal?

This is going to be a bit technical but we want you guys to know exactly what is happening.

All Stardock community sites share the same underlying Stardock.net database structure. Your UserID and Password will work on JU, GalCiv2.com, TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, SocietyGame.com, PoliticalMachine.com and even in Stardock.com's forums. The same is true of the blogs/posts.

When I write a blog here, it goes into a single master database which then gets replicated out to other databases (to increase speed). Based on the category you posted, that blog will show up (get syndicated) to other Stardock.net based sites.

For example, if I write a blog on Windows Vista in the category Personal Computing, it will also show up on TotalGaming.net and WinCustomize.com. This has been part of our goal to make sure people's blogs get read by people. That was one of th eincentives to creating JoeUser.com in the first place -- most blogs never get read. But here on JU, we make sure your words get out there so that you can interact with other people.

The problem, however, is that JoeUser.com was the first of these sites to be created with this system. Or put another way, when we wrote JoeUser.com, we were just learning how to do this stuff.

As the network of sites has grown in popularity and traffic, JoeUser.com has taken a bigger and bigger bite out of the overall resources available to ALL the sites. Resources like CPU usages and database bandwidth. JoeUser.com, which gets only around 5,000 unique visitors per day (which is still quite a bit) uses up over 50% of our ENTIRE network's resources in CPU and database resources. The other half is shared by WinCustomize.com, TotalGaming.net, Stardock Forums, GalCiv2.com, etc. which get over 150,000 unique visitors per day (30 times).

To put it another way, by itself, JoeUser.com was slowly bringing the whole network to a crawl. And it still is. Since we don't want to have to rush rewriting the site using the newer technology developed for WinCustomize and TotalGaming.net, we're trying to figure out preciesely what it is about JoeUser.com that does this. And unfortunately, that means keeping JoeUser.com down when that happens.

We are getting closer to figuring out the problem but we can totally relate that it's very frustrating that we can't get to our blogs. Hopefully within a few more days we'll be back and the site will be faster than it was before.

Thanks for your understanding and patience!

Comments (Page 1)

stutefish

on Jul 27, 2005

Draginol, thank you very much for the hard work, and for taking the time to explain what's going on.

You don't owe me any of that, and for coming through with it anyway, I'm very grateful.

Good luck!

Draginol

on Jul 27, 2005

To see how the other sites deal with the same post, here's TotalGaming.net:

http://totalgaming.stardock.com/articles.aspx?AID=82075

There are some issues with it display the # of commments (part of our analsysis in trying to figure out why things are so slow, we turned off that job for now). But you can see how much faster TG.net is at doing the same thing.

foreverserenity

on Jul 27, 2005

Thanks for the update Brad. It's a hassle but I'm dealing....slowly......but sorely..um, make that surely!

Manopeace

on Jul 27, 2005

Brad...didn't have a clue what you were talking about...but thanks for the update and thanks for the great team you have!

aeryck

on Jul 27, 2005

Hi Brad,
After a minor sabbatical from posting, all of sweet six weeks I returned to find the User forum rather depleted in terms of posting life. I am sure I should be able to charge it up with so controversial subjects. As to the technical, I only noticed one thing, sometimes one makes and edit and it doesn't come through immediately, then I come back a half an hour later and then it is there. Other than that, I think you are doing a super job and the site looks still as beautiful as ever. Just a pat on the back, I have been out there and either they are pretty and sluggish, or they are thread bare and efficient, everyone has their problems.

lifehappens

on Jul 27, 2005

Thanks for the updates, we appreciate everything you do for us freeloaders!

relswick

on Jul 27, 2005

why not make a copy of a couple of the main sites and the database, put it over on some dev servers and play with the code... just a thought, which you probably already have either thought of or tried or are doing. Of course, you probably need the 150k of traffic to really test it out, but still.

Rich

SATYROBE

on Jul 27, 2005

Thanks! Backup & PRINT ur stuff, users! So u know where it USED to be channeled, then u MAY know where it could get REchanneled to! Put it on ur PC + indep. sites as well, AND GET PEOPLE TO SUBSCRIBE! Frogboys missin 2000,- more subscrips annually, otherwise WC also endangered! If it makes you feel better or worse, Deviant Art search function was down months ago even for subscribers. Backup! Backup! SkinBaseOrg also endangered, secure stuff u only have there, too!

Steven Peaple

on Jul 27, 2005

Been wondering about that. Thank you for the up date and even coming up with this in the first place. It's fabulous!

Dr Guy

on Jul 27, 2005

Brad,

I do know exactly what you are talking about! We bit the bullet and rebuilt the first site. But I do know what you mean.

of course our first site was over 5 years old, AND we had to move it to new servers anyway.

Thanks for the explanation and hanging in there.

ParaTed2k

on Jul 27, 2005

Brad, thanks so much for the update on the progress. The biggest problem with all this is, I'm losing my beloved addiction to JU!! ;~D

Glad to hear that you are working the problem and that you are moving your whole internet operation forward. I admit I've been very frustrated with the growing pains (Danny caught some of my venting in IMs this morning), but I have no doubt that JU (and the rest of Stardock.com) will come out the better for it all.

T-Man

on Jul 27, 2005

We have made some good progress in the last day or two. We have rebuilt some of the internal handling of the article data which has significantly reduced the number of cpu cycles it takes to read the data. This has increased the speed in which article data is fetched but has also reduced server load off our main database which should allow everything that accesses that system to have increased performance as well.

There is still more work to do but it looks like we are on the right track!

Champas Socialist

on Jul 28, 2005

Good work guys, it sounds like a worthwhile project, and one worth waiting for.

Can I just ask, am I the only one who has lost some bits of their articles. My last one has somehow been cut off about a quarter of the way through.

Manopeace

on Jul 28, 2005

We have made some good progress in the last day or two.

Always had faith in you T Man...Thanks!!

ParaTed2k

on Jul 28, 2005

Just curious, will we be getting our personalized margin links and photos back?

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