MicrostockGroup
Microstock Photography Forum - General => Microstock News => Topic started by: Istock News on September 14, 2007, 11:52
-
So here"s the deal. [keep in mind this is a simplified explanation of a really complex problem]
The problems we fixed last week had to do with throughput. When those bottlenecks were fixed, it increased the load on the servers by a truly significant amount (average load was higher than our highest peaks--ever). Which is fine. That much more traffic means lots more sales.
Unfortunately we hit a snag along the way. We ran up against a known bug in mySQL 5 (which is what the site runs on). We simply can"t process any more transactions per second. Yeah, it"s a good problem to have. There is a fix in the next version of mySQL, but it"s in beta and a long way from being production-ready (and no, adding more machines doesn"t help in this case).
So our developers have been coding around the problem. It"s slow and meticulous work. Kinda like changing the fan belt on a car doing 60 on the freeway.
We turned off stats because they were hitting the servers especially hard, and aggravating the bug. We"re running the script to update your graphs every afternoon. It takes about 3 hours to run, but in the mean time, your number of downloads and cash balance is always up to date. There is code in place that should allow us to turn it back on--we"ll know if it"s ready to go by late Monday.
Hope that clears things up a bit. Thanks for hanging in there.
-
If this was a known bug, I wonder why they didn't foresee this problem?
-
istocknews: thanks for taking the time to update us on this problem, which personally i had been wondering about (in another thread).
As for me, I don't care how long you have to turn the forums and stats off for if the reason is that you are being overwhelmed by buyers.
Good luck fixing the problem. ( I used to do some programming myself and I'm glad all I do is make little pictures to sell.)