http://www.designhousedigital.com/content/category/blog/
The wall calendar project is the one I've been putting off for weeks because I knew it would be a ton of work and I just didn't want to get going. Once I did though, I remembered how much I enjoy digital scrapbooking.
And I do. And I'm very lucky since, as an owner, I have access to everything on DHD.
Speaking of DHD, the site has been a constant point of stress for me since May. The site just slowed down and got slower and slower. We moved hosting companies, got bigger hardware, moved our database to its own server, moved our downloads to Amazon S3, and still the site was just not performing. None of the analysis I was doing explained why things were so slow. Last week, the average page load time was 30 seconds! Absolutely awful.
Well, I was brainstorming with one of my colleagues about the problem and a light bulb went on in my head. I built these widgets. People who post their scrapbook pages in our gallery can put this widget on their blog and display their DHD layouts. And it is NOT tracked for our analytics. Here is what it looks like:
I searched through the server logs to see how much these widgets had been used, and found 50 million of these buggers. My widget code set a 5-second timer and each time the widget would refresh itself with a random picture. So it was just used so much it was taking down our store. I removed the timer and site speed went from 30-second page loads to 3-second page loads. I'm still kind of floored by it, but glad the problem has been solved.
No comments:
Post a Comment