What a rough stretch it has been for the past several days.

Starting mid-last week we were seeing major performance issues on BUMPzee. The database slowed to a crawl and queries that were previously taking fractions of a second to execute were taking tens of seconds. With the constant data updates that happen on BZ, frequent deadlocks were occurring, sending the server spiraling down into sometimes complete unresponsiveness.

We tried everything we could to optimize queries, tables, data, indexes, stripped out some heavy queries, and more. Nothing would work.

Several times, we had to take BUMPzee into maintenance mode so we could do some major database operations. And a few times, I disabled the widgets so they wouldn’t cause your websites to slow down while they loaded.

To make matters even more stressful, I was a groomsman in a wedding this weekend. I was checking on the server and cleaning up the deadlock from my iPhone when necessary. (Don’t tell the bride!)

Once it started to look like the problems were deeper than the data. We upgraded the database, restarted servers and services. Something, or some combinations of things did the trick. Now finally, things are looking back to normal. Unfortunately, I changed so much that I won’t ever know what the root cause of the problems were. On the bright side, as I write this, things are looking faster than ever thanks to all of the database optimization and tuning we did.

I sincerely apologize for the slowdowns you were experiencing here and on your blogs due to the widgets. I hope that we’re out of the woods on this one.

New Algo
I’m testing a new homepage ranking algorithm. It rewards things a little differently and gets some of the hotter topics up onto the homepage.

Widgets
There are now some BUMPzee blog widgets under development. You can see them at the bottom of any blog entry on jangro.com. Example: BUMPzee is born.

I’ve also changed the way dumps appear in the visible scores. They get registered, but not calculated. The visible number is “bumps” only. Dumps are recorded and factored into the ultimate display of the entry, but I didn’t feel good about people having negative values on the displayed score.

I’ll be making the widgets available for beta testing soon. Drop a note in jangro’s profile if you’d like to participate.

We’ve added an affiliate marketing world map. You need to click the link at the top to “opt-in” and make sure your city, state, and country are filled out in your profile.

Whoa! What the heck happened here? How did I end up on BUMPzee.com?
I liked the way this site has been turning out and decided that I’d better get it onto it’s own domain sooner rather than later. Full details here.

There are blogs and message board postings all over the place asking the question, “Are you going to <insert event name>?” Now BUMPzee members can learn about events and indicate whether they’re going or not.

Start with Affiliate Summit. Are you going?