Please accept our apologies for the forums going down for a while tonight. We’ve been experiencing record traffic levels since this afternoon, and our servers were handling things admirably. Just when we were breathing a sigh of relief, something happened. Restoration of service was complicated by some infrastructure problems that took a while to sort out.
We know how much you all rely on CC, particularly on a day when so many of you received decisions. I can assure you our tech staff was on top of the problem instantly since they were monitoring the forums continously all afternoon and evening. We’ll be analyzing what happened to ensure we prevent a reoccurence. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you all got at least some good news today!
^So in essence, snowdog, you think your relatively “free” bulletin board service should over-engineer its IT infrastructure by an order of 10 to accommodate the ONE day a year when it’s throttled by those its serves (did I mention the free part???)
Give 'em a break. They almost had it nailed this year!
Actually, we DO accept the blame for the outage (though we don’t have all the details yet), and we DO attempt to way overengineer for the inevitable surges. Oddly, the downtime occurred when traffic levels were no longer peaking.
We’ll learn from this experience and do a better job in the future. One good thing: when we design for crazy days like yesterday, it also means on normal days our site is fast and responsive. Thanks for the understanding, we appreciate your participation here at CC!
Ummm…isn’t this the same CC that had failures at about this time of year each of the past two years? Not sure that whatever traffic engineering you’re doing is well thought through.
Snow dog, of course they’re not a charity. But for you, a user, it’s a free service, supported by a behavioral ad network. I just find it interesting that people assume infrastructure is as free as the air you breath, and that those who complain the loudest seem to be the one’s not paying for it Infrastructure isn’t free, and peak planning is not an exact science, or at least one that always makes fiscal sense given the unpredictable nature of peak traffic.
I wonder how much ad money is generated on Ivy decision day. I also wonder if they could target ads specifically on Ivy decision day… safety colleges, loan programs, “book your flight to X here,” etc.
