Our site is growing at a pretty steady clip. Almost every day we are getting a couple hundred new people signing up on the site. When we first launched ActiveRain, we had very aggresive goals for membership numbers. We also had limited programming resources. So as we added features and members at a dizzying pace, sometimes the necessary attention was not paid to scalability issues.
Over the last six months we have been retro fitting the site to make sure that all of our features can scale with the increasing membership numbers. Last night, we pushed a critical infrastructure upgrade to the site. As you attempted to log on this morning, or today you may have been met with upgrades evil twin Mr. Proxy Error. He is a mean guy who does not care about your passion for real estate.
What the heck is a Proxy Error anyways?
Whenever you click on a page on ActiveRain, a query is sent to our database to display that page. There's a pretty good chance that someone else clicked on another page .001 seconds after you. This happens in succession and there are always pages waiting to be loaded. Every once in a while (although it seems more frequent recently) one of the queries will run into a problem and not be able to display the page in a timely manner. This is where the Proxy Error starts. At the same time, Queries that are in line to be displayed begin to time out and the result is proxy errors for pages that would otherwise display fine, but since they are behind a page taking too long to display, they are affected as well. Of course, if you are anything like me, you hit the refresh button five times and force the query to be requested again. The vicious cycle then displays Proxy Errors for everyone in line.
(please note, this is a very elementary explanation because quite frankly my understanding of it is very elementary.......the developers are busy fixing this stuff so the PHD explanation is not available)
Please know that your frustration is shared by our entire team. Our developers have been working their fingers to the bone over the last few days to ensure that Mr. Proxy Error is eradicated. Mr. Proxy Error is still lingering a bit but his appearances are becoming fewer and farther between.
In addition to Mr. Proxy Error there may be some other minor issues on the site today as well. We are aware of many of them but if you know of something please feel free to leave it in the comments.
We are really sorry for the annoyance that these upgrade cause and want everyone to know that we are continually making improvements to the foundation of the site so that you don't have to worry about stability. I promise you that no one reading this is getting more gray hairs over this thing than Jon and Jeff (wait, nevermind not those two.....they have no hair) Brad and Rich and I.
Thank you for your support and your patience, we really appreciate it!!
Friends, followers, and connections are the way of the future.
Make sure you check out some of our Facebook Fan Pages Too!
