Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
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 2)
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on Jul 28, 2005

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.

No.  This is a problem we are aware of.  Its a problem with our routines that copy the data from one database to another.  The original data is still intact.  Hopefully we will have this corrected today.

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

Yes.  I will probably start turning some of that back on tomorrow if the site continues to run well for another day.

on Jul 28, 2005

Yes. I will probably start turning some of that back on tomorrow if the site continues to run well for another day.

Will the forums and Other tabs be working then as well? 

BTW: Thanks for all you are doing.

on Jul 30, 2005
Oh cool, thanks T-man!
on Aug 14, 2005
Will the search feature be fixed?
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