Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Site Performance Issue Resolve

Warning, there is a lot of geek talk in this post ;)

When it comes to site performance and optimization it becomes a cat and mouse game between the developer and the growing user base. For the last 2 weeks I notice high CPU usage from the database. My first attempt to solve the problem was to enable query caching, increase the size of the temp tables, restarting the service, etc. At first it appeared that page load speed were back to normal, but after another spike in traffic myVidster's servers could not keep up. Last night during peak usage I decided to look at the queries that the database were processing. I notice several update queries in the queue and I wonder why myVidster is executing so many updates, most queries should be selects or inserts. Then I remember that I reorder all the videos in a channel when a new one was added (which requires an update to those videos)! This is not an issues when a user has a few videos, but as myVidster grows user's collections have grown to the 100s and 1000s of videos!

I change the logic so that an update is no longer needed to videos in a channel when a new video is added. Doing this drop the database's CPU usage in half and page load speed was back to normal. One a side note, I notice that users are now trying out our storage upgrade service! For those who do not know what this is, adding storage to your account will allow you to backup your videos to myVidster for safe keep and viewing. More info on our upgrade page.

Monday, September 6, 2010

We are at 10 million pageviews!!! Well almost ;)

Here is a long overdue update on myVidster's traffic growth.

Pageviews (last 30 days): 9,869,465
Visits (last 30 days): 853,708
Users: 35,846
Collections: 35,196
Bookmarked Videos: 352,164

Wow, both # of visits and users have double since my last post on traffic. As for updates to myVidster, I move to new servers (2 Quad core servers) and I have migrated the search engine from Zend Lucene to Solr Lucene. I LOVE Solr's search engine solution, Zend could not keep up with myVidster's growth and search queries were taking up to 10 seconds during peak hours, grrrrrrr. Solr executes within 1-2 seconds without consuming too much of the server's resources.

I know I have not been adding new features lately, but I recently left my day job to pursue a the life of self employment and been busy building up other businesses to make a living. I am considering setting up self serving advertising to increase revenue for myVidster. Right now I use an ad network and the network takes a cut of the revenue which makes it hard for me to make a living on myVidster.

Thanks again for all the support and keep telling your friends about myVidster!!!