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Sun 1st Aug 2010 9:11am
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prince.org staff blog

news from the folks who run prince.org

Weekly updates for 2010-07-25

July 25th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-18

July 18th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-11

July 11th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-04

July 4th, 2010

If the elevator stops, punch a higher floor… oops, server crash!

June 28th, 2010

OK, so the BET awards last night caused a pretty significant influx of additional traffic to prince.org. Once we got 3.5x the usual traffic, things started to go downhill quickly. We ran out of memory, and then out of CPU. It’s not supposed to happen; we should be able to handle reasonable spikes in usage, but then again, we ain’t runnin’ Google here :)

Here’s what it looked like from a “load” perspective on our Linux server:

During normal days, we stay under 1.0, which means essentially, nothing the server is asked to do, waits… everything is serviced as fast as it is requested. Even a load of 2 or 3 can be manageable, but when our web traffic drives us this hard this quickly, we exhaust resources and go into a ‘death spiral’. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens when Prince is the center of major media attention (the previous time was the Super Bowl). So, even though it can be inconvenient, and I do apologize… I kind of wish there was a reason for Prince to make the site crash more :)

Weekly updates for 2010-06-27

June 27th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-06-20

June 20th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-06-13

June 13th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-06-06

June 6th, 2010

Goodbye [b]! WYSIWYG composing is here!

May 30th, 2010

Yes, well, I finally got fed up with the creaky old composing window, and it’s “web 1.0″ way of doing things… so I added some pretty cool features, I think.

Now when you compose new messages (replies, new topics), you get a snazzy new WYSIWYG editor, which lets you do bold, italics, lists, etc. all quite easily and in a more foolproof way. Less previewing, more concentrating on what you really want to say!

As with any changes, there will likely be bugs. Let me know any you find, probably the easiest way is via the forum posting (but responding here is OK too.)

p.s. I also added an autosave draft feature… every minute, whatever you’re composing will get saved. If you accidentally close your browser window before submitting, or your browser crashes, or whatever, you can come back later and pick up where you left off as of the last autosave. You’ll get notices on the forum overview and thread-reading pages if there’s a draft for that area, waiting for you. I hope this helps everyone write long(er) / more thoughtful messages with peace of mind!