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First of all, our first mixtape contest went off great. Some of the entries were pretty incredible. Congratulations to our winners:

1st - Alice
2nd - claireillinoise
3rd - galaxiepi

We'll finish tidying up after this one and get another contest started shortly.

Also, Eric and I met yesterday to discuss our 2.0 strategy. It's going to be pretty bitching, but it will be slow coming.

Additionally, some of the small downtime and general sluggishness of the site has been bugging me...so I wrote some code to analyze some of our database communication in order to isolate what is slowing us down.

The results were pretty surprising. Nearly all of the slowdown on the site (20ish sec load times, 5 min lockouts, etc) can be directly pinpointed to just a few isolated things.

First, activating a mix was causing some really inefficient code to run which completely locked everyone out of the site for upwards of 200-300 seconds. I changed a "ANY(" to an "IN(" and it seems to have fixed it. 4 mixes were activated afterwards and took no more than 15 seconds each to process!

Some other culprits are random artist/album/track. Based on the analysis, these are taking upwards of 50-60 seconds on average. I won't take their functionality out, but I'd recommend not using them for a day or two until I optimize them.

Finally, narcissism is going to be temporarily removed (don't worry, we'll still be getting data and will bring it back later)...user central takes an average of 15-20 seconds to load and the narcissism calculation takes ~80% of that.

We're going to try to nail these down and fix em so hopefully the experience can improve for all!

comments:

alexandra

Level 11

It's okay because the narcissism deal just causes me to get made fun of because people already think i'm an irl one D:

8/10/06 8:47am

galaxiepi

Level 26

I was wondering about the mix activiation drag. Luckily I'm paranoid and save after every track I've added, but the last couple mixes I've had to close the browser and (usually) wait until the next morning until I can even get back onto the site.

8/10/06 9:12am

shaz

Level 11

I still can't believe you would have any bad queries in the first place after studying under the database master... Toshi!

8/10/06 10:14am

Alice

Level 24

YAY!

8/10/06 10:30am

bootylicious

Level 28

Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!

8/10/06 10:43am

eric

Level 25

Alice, you have some of the best freaking badges on this site. I'm actually really jealous of your badge.

8/10/06 11:29am

Alice

Level 24

aww, thanks eric! I agree! I do have some totally awesome badges, thanks to you guys!!

8/10/06 12:15pm

O_O

Level 16

I had noticed that activating a mixtape would shutdown the site for a while. Glad this got fixed.

8/10/06 12:55pm

jwalker

Level 18

I'm jealous of Alice's badge too

8/10/06 10:53pm

coreysprague

Level 20

I had to temporarily remove the 'most frequently used' lists from the top lists page, because loading them was bringing down the site.

Stupid MySQL, if we were using SQL Server this shit wouldn't happen. Argh. Oh well, I'm not going to shell out money to microsoft, so open source it is.

8/11/06 7:21am