March 30, 2010

BP Unfiltered

Site Slowness

by Dave Pease

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You've probably noticed the slowness on our server over the last week or so. It turns out we've been doing a ton of Player Forecast Manager business this year--we're at about 250% of the usage that we've had in any previous year--and the system just isn't scaling well. We've made a couple of changes tonight and we're hoping that'll keep things rolling until we get past everyone's late fantasy drafts and the usage tails off.

We've been running on our current dedicated machine for a few years now, and it's served us pretty well most of that time, but it's plainly time for a change. We're in the planning stages of moving the works to a more flexible multi-server environment that will allow us to quickly deploy additional resources to respond to increased load.  We're also looking forward to "jailing" processor- and database-intensive applications like PFM on their own servers, where they won't impact the performance of the rest of the site.

Unfortunately, we can't yet flip the switch on that, and without taking PFM offline entirely we haven't found a good solution to this issue.  We're continuing to work on it, and I apologize for the delays you've experienced recently and will probably experience over the next few days.

Dave Pease is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @davepease
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