Growth pains

Growth pains

15:09 PM, 10th March 2014, About 11 years ago 2

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UPDATE

All of our upgrades have now taken affect – Property118 is now running at Warp Factor 🙂

The growth of the Property118 community has certainly caught us off guard in recent months and has been much greater than we could ever have anticipated. For this reason we have been swimming against the tide in terms of the pace of upgrades required to our systems to be able to deal with the increased demands. It’s not just the West Brom Tracker Rate Campaign article which went viral, but this has certainly been a catalyst of the growth we have experienced. Once people arrive at the website they tend to stick around, become members, join in discussions and read other stuff too which is good, but only when the website is performing as it should of course! Property118 Growth pains

Needless to say, the increased popularity has certainly not come without yet another bout of growth pains!

The speed of the website, especially comment posting, was never a problem before now. We knew that we could easily cope with up to 4 million actions per day! We also knew that we were getting nowhere near that many visitors so we couldn’t understand why we were getting so many reports of intermittent problems.

Fortunately we have an incredible IT team and they eventually worked out the cause of the problem and find a solution. They discovered that if more than 46 people per second try to do something (e.g. click to see a different page etc.) the website was freezing and others couldn’t even get in. That’s what’s been happening to several of our readers and why the problems have been so hard for us to pinpoint. One minute it’s broken but by the time we’ve been informed and had an opportunity to look into it there isn’t a problem any more. Next minute we have the problem again! The peak times are when we send article and comment notifications and several people are online at the same time.

Having discovered the causes of the problem we are now in the process to upgrading to similar technology to to the really huge shopping websites and will be able to deal with 1,000 people per second hitting our website.

We are hoping the solutions will be 100% effective within 3 days time, in the meantime we thank all members for theor forbearance.

We would also like to remind all members that Property118 is funded entirely by donations and sponsorships. The increased popularity and the cost of maintaining and improving the website is certainly taking it toll on or reserves. Therefore, please help us by visiting THIS PAGE.


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Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

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18:24 PM, 10th March 2014, About 11 years ago

Good news, 90% of the upgrade work has now been completed and the website is now running 200% faster than this time last week. Site speed will halve again over the next few days and we can now handle 1,000 actions per second 🙂

I look forward to the day we have to upgrade again, actually correct that, the day we have completed the next necessary upgrade - it's been stressful to say the least!
.

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

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19:15 PM, 11th March 2014, About 11 years ago

UPDATE

All of our upgrades have now taken affect - Property118 is now running at Warp Factor 🙂
.

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