It's half dead again

While the forums seem to come up, MyFlyertalk appears not to be working.

Can the database be that active on a Sunday morning [in the US] ?

It's zipping along just fine for me this morning....although 5 minutes from now I may have to eat my words...and everything is in working order including MyFlyertalk.

Well... only 3 more days until two weeks have passed.... the anticipation is.....

Very erratic here -- freezing and timing out one minute, working fine the next.

Poking along once again.

Whew, sure am glad to hear I'm not the only one... I thought it may have been my connection, since some other sites were operating slowly, but looks like I'm not alone in this. It's definitely sloooow - sometimes not responsive even. I feel like I'm back on dial-up - even worse, perhaps?

Hopefully this will be fixed soon - but do keep up the nice work and communication, admins. =)

It's miserable. If I didn't like FT so much, I would've walked away weeks ago.

In the real business world, when something is performing this badly, companies do whatever they can to restore good service as soon as possible. Apparently, this isn't the real business world.

It's incredibly miserable today.

I really did think that one of the upsides of the sale was moving the FT servers to something that was rock-solid. I guess not.

Probably all those ads slowing it down.

Is something really being done to fix this problem?

I'm just like some one else said if I didn't like FT so much I would've left long ago. It is slower than slow now.(If this goes)
I don't know how much more I can take before I'm gone.
What's the latest ?

Over the past few weeks we have been working to determine the root cause of the periodic site slowness. We are seeing a direct correlation between the volume of searches (especially advanced searches) and the site slowdowns. What we are finding, is that during periods of heavy searching, the ability to post new messages and view existing posts is held up while the long running search queries run against the database. We have also noticed a correlation between periods of high moderation activity and site slowness.

We think we have a plan in place to allow the community to continue to do these two important functions (search and moderation) while keeping the site responsive to the community. We are planning to make a couple of substantial changes that we feel will fix these unacceptable slowdowns.

1) We will be replacing the default MySQL database search with a powerful, scalable search engine that we have developed. This search duplicates almost all of the existing search features and is capable of handling the high level of traffic that FlyerTalk receives. We are planning to roll out this new search tonight. Shortly after (next week sometime) we will be releasing an updated version that includes the few remaining features of the old MySQL search. We feel that the current search is the single biggest contributor to the site slowness and that this new search will make a big difference.

2) The second major change that we're planning to make is to add a second database server to our environment. This will allow us to split the traffic across two databases. By doing this, we'll be able to serve all thread/post views from one database and offload the more intensive thread/post writing and moderation to a second database.

We appreciate your patience as we work through this problem and always welcome your feedback as we roll out these features.

Thank you,
Kevin Hayes
Internet Brands

Kevin,

Not sure how what you wrote is different than what John wrote 13 days ago.

I take it we will not see this implemented as quickly as John said?

They think the new search will address most of the issues, that goes out tonight. My fingers are crossed on seeing improvements b/c this has been painful.

Kevin -

1 - Will FT be down at all to accomodate the implementation of the new search engine?

2 - What is the timeframe for the second database server?

Thanks

We decided to do this a little early -- the new search is in place. We didn't take the board down, but there was a short disruption in the search availability.
Kevin