This is probably the busiest week of the year for this site. BookScouter traffic has more than tripled since last year at this time. Last week I added an extra server to give the site some more capacity. I’m happy that all of the servers have been performing well, but the problem now is all of the websites whose prices this site is searching are also getting stressed. It is also their busiest time of the year as well and some of them aren’t handling the added volume as well as others.

That means that sometimes when BookScouter tries to look up prices on their sites, it goes really slowly. That in-turn causes prices to show up slower on BookScouter. I’ve tried to account for slow sites, and in general it does a good job, but I’m occasionally seeing issues where it still goes slow. I’m investigating those more closely to see if I can prevent these cases that are still getting through.

I’ve also been working on tweaking some server-related settings to try and optimize things as much as possible. I’m keeping a pretty close eye on things and continually trying to make sure that the site is performing well for everybody.

As always, please Contact us if you would like to let us know how how the site is working for you.

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts
BookScouter.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 10:34 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.