MicrostockGroup

Thank you for your support during this trying time. We realize how frustrating the site stability issues are. Like you, we rely on the site for our design needs, income and pretty much every social interaction we have throughout the day.

Please don"t take our silence on the topic as being ignorant to the problem. There are 60+ people working on this issue here at iStock HQ. It"s without a doubt, our top priority. I would also like to personally apologize to all of you as this is ultimately my fault for not seeing this issue coming and planning accordingly. This Summer we added a lot of new hardware in preparation for the September rush. We received way more traffic than expected. Our new hardware doesn"t really seem to have helped. It appears as though we"re reaching the upper limits of what MySQL can do, which is leading us to re-architect large portions of the site in short periods of time. For those who are a little more technical, the basic problem occurring with MySQL is messy recoveries from locked queries. This is generally what is causing the 503 errors. We work constantly to optimize queries, but most recently the entire technical staff has been pitching in to solve this situation.

We will try more diligently to keep you informed about new releases, code pushes and changes. We are positive that we"re making progress. There are code releases several times per day and a couple more coming today. With some luck and your support, the problems will be solved shortly.

I haqve wondered that as well . I suppose if it would help to ease the load on the entire system,IS's it folks would shut the forums down. But, not being an IT expert myself, this is purely speculation on my part. Hope it is all resolved soon!

Maybe it has something to do with accounting/bookkeeping/transactions - the sites you mentioned aren't retail outlets.

Shutterstock seems to do things differently, we go to a different site to check stats and play on the forum.  In my brief experience at SS, there hasn't been any of these monstrous troubles the others eventually stumble into that I've noticed.  I wouldn't be surprised if contributors spend more time than purchasers on these sites.

i don't know much about programing things but i heard someone say before (perhaps it was on here somewhere) that this is the same problem friendster  ran into a little while ago... maybe someone else has more info 

Yeah, that was me. Friendster ran into this exact problem. If someone wants a technical explanation just p.m. me.

ah yes.. now i remember. thanks for the post in this thread as well.

well, i think all of that is pretty obvious from the ongoing problems they've had since i've been with them, including the implementation (if you can call it that) of the whole disambiguation thing.

all of that points to exactly why i will never be exclusive with them

Wow, do you have a degree in computer science? Have you worked on large database apps? I did my masters dissertation on distributed graphics rendering (and I used MySQL) before giving up on computer science and going to law school. My question for you is do you actually know about large scale databases or are you just arguing for the fun of it?

About your quote, did you read all the paragraphs above that? The reason for this mornings crash? The 45 minute recover time, that's because MySQL still doesn't have hotbackups or automatic point in time recovery like Oracle or MS SQL. The locking problems wouldn't have occurred on Oracle or MS SQL since they both have row-level locking while MySQL has limited row-level locking, but mainly table-level.

Here is the quote that counter acts what you quoted: "Then there are solutions that promise huge returns, but would require re-architecting the entire system; rewriting a very large portion of the code and database queries while deploying a new server infrastructure. There were reasons why these approaches were not taken seven years ago when the company was starting - with 5 people running a hobby site on a second hand server."

Then the most important one"I am not going to tell you here which approach we are taking - except to say that we are looking forward to growing the site ten times, fifty times, five hundred times the size of what we are today." They wouldn't have said this if they were going to stick with MySQL. Yes iStock would have to rewrite a lot of code because Oracle databases have slightly different calls and many features would have to be completely rewritten to take advantage of the unique features of the large database systems.

If you feel like continuing to argue then I will write a detail technical explanation for you. In the mean time I'll be considering canceling my exclusive contract.

Edit: Oh, and lastly. "To a database, a transaction is a transaction is a transaction" is a complete misstatement since a view is different from an insert, which is different than a deletion. Not to mention MySQL is a database system without proper transactions.