Server Performance Updates (October 2014)

New thread to track recent server/network issues.

• Yesterday's update greatly increased the stability of the site. It was a good server day; compared to the last few weeks.
• Today we applied significant improvements to our caching, the result of which has reduced our server load by upwards of 50%. The site is very responsive right now and handling peak usage/traffic spikes quite well.
• Despite all of this, @Mike and I are researching and testing a next generate hosting solution. We're done with archaic hosting companies with too many moving parts.
• We'll continue to monitor and post any updates.

In the meantime, thanks again to everyone for the patience and support.

Cheers!

 

Just ran into an issue that required multiple service restarts, which seems to have fixed things for now.

We'll continue to monitor.

 

This past Sunday I made some significant database/code optimizations that impact several of our top viewed pages. The update has resulted in a massive increase in performance and no server issues since.

The gist of the optimizations is that we're now storing frequently used beer stats versus creating a database call that scans hundreds of thousands of thousands of records every time the page is requested. A single query was fast, however, when we stacked the load of a busy site (and past issues) on top of this, it didn't scale well and lead to problems.

Example: top beer lists and beer pages are noticeably quicker to load.

The only downside is that it's less realtime, but the stored stats are recalculated on a daily basis.

As always, we'll continue to monitor and update as needed.