ForumsNewsBrief spike in traffic causes downtime
Brief spike in traffic causes downtime
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
A few minutes ago we experienced a brief spike in traffic that caused our servers to get overloaded. During this approximately 15 minute window you may or may not have been able to access Toodledo. It looks like about half of the connections failed. We're not really sure what caused it right now, but the traffic has died down and everything is back to normal.
We are in the midst of migrating to new servers with more redundancy and capacity, so hopefully these types of events will be a thing of the past. |
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Vin Thomas |
This seems to be more and more of an issue. Wonder why many other sites don't have these issues. Is it merely a server issue, or is it something to do with the app itself?
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cburkins |
Vin,
you wrote: "Wonder why many other sites don't have these issues." Many sites do have these issues at some point in their growth phase. Whether those sites survive depends on how well they respond to the growing pains. I've got great hopes for toodledo. And some of toodledo's problems seem to have been problems with rackspace.com, who have been generally excellent for years, though they've been having a rocky stretch lately. |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
It is hardware related. Toodledo has been growing very fast and it has been difficult to keep up with demand. We upgraded our servers in January with extra capacity, but we are already running out so we are upgrading again to get even more. So, today's brief outage can be attributed to growing pains.
The previous outages were unrelated. They were caused by our datacenter's infrastructure which is outside of our control. We are currently migrating to a new datacenter and new upgraded servers. This should solve both of the above problems and also give us more built in redundancy. This will make us more protected from events like this in the future. |
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Proximo |
There are many ways to measure growth.
One of them is hitting the capacity of your current servers. While the temporary delay may be undesirable for the users, the fact that Toodledo is already in the process to expand their servers makes me feel at ease. Sometimes you can gauge your growth, but with services like Toodledo, it's harder to do so. One good review on a Blog can cause a major spike in users. The important thing is that Toodledo addresses the issue and is prepared to grow. |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
I wanted to say one more thing. When you put your to-do list on Toodledo, you are putting it in the cloud. The cloud is great for a lot of reasons, which I'm not going to go into here because I'm assuming that you are all convinced of the benefits already, otherwise you wouldn't be using Toodledo.
The one big drawback to the cloud is availability. Toodledo may be down, our data center may have issues, your ISP may have problems, your internet connection may be down, your browser may be misbehaving, or any of a number of other things. Toodledo will never have the same availability as paper and pencil. By using the cloud, you have to accept that uptime will not be 100%. If you cannot tolerate temporary unavailability on occasion, then Toodledo (or any other cloud service) is not appropriate for your situation. That said, we are working extraordinarily hard to minimize the downtime caused by things under our control. It may be bad for you to lose access to your to-do list, but it is immeasurably worse for us as a company. This message was edited Jul 28, 2009. |
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Vin Thomas |
Posted by cburkins:
Vin, you wrote: "Wonder why many other sites don't have these issues." Many sites do have these issues at some point in their growth phase. Whether those sites survive depends on how well they respond to the growing pains. I've got great hopes for toodledo. And some of toodledo's problems seem to have been problems with rackspace.com, who have been generally excellent for years, though they've been having a rocky stretch lately. Hey, I am the biggest supporter of toodledo. I have written articles, participated in the forums, submitted toodledo to resource directories, etc. But at the same time I care about availability. I have used MANY MANY products in beta, and I haven't used one that has this many downtime issues. I understand that this is part of the growing pains of Toodledo, and I am happy to see so many people jump on board. Honestly, was I crippled by not having access to my Toodledo for 20 mins? No. But it has become a bit annoying to see this happen every couple weeks. @Toodledo I appreciate your urgency to minimize downtime and move to a more stable system. |
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Vin Thomas |
And as a side note I think it is somewhat silly to hide comments because of negative votes. If it were an illegitimate comment that would be fine, but I think the latest rounds of downtime is a reasonable concern.
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Anders |
Vin, you're helpfulness and excitement about Toodledo were a factor in my early opinion of the website, and eventual decision to become involved in these forums. I think most people know you are a staunch supporter. I like the general idea of the thumb system, but it is not always properly used. Just like any system where the masses are in power, the thumbs have their faults, but are a good idea on the end IMO. I wonder if that makes me a communist...
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kleerkoat |
It doesn't make you a communist, a socialist more like it, which is a good thing in my book.
OK, let's leave politics out of this. ;-) I think I've been using Toodledo for almost 2 years now, I put my whole workload in it, and am getting more and more people in my company using it. Do I place all my eggs in Toodledo's basket? No, anyone who would do that is foolish. Toodledo is a tool, sometimes tools break and you can't get something done right away, access should never be taken for granted. I think the big Toodledo-er in the sky is handling these outages beutifully. Keep up the good work. |
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Proximo |
@Vin,
Vin, I was a little upset when I saw the hidden comment and read it. There was nothing negative about it, you where simply asking a question in light of the recent issues. I agree with Anders in that the Thumb System can be used in the wrong way and this is an good example of that. I think the Thumb Down should only be used for negative or disrespectful comments to others. Nobody wants to read that type of feedback. The funny thing is that we are all curious and will always click to see the comment. I will make a suggestion on the Questions section about this. So don't worry Vin, we appreciate you. |
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mikefapex |
In general I have been finding the toodledo.com website to be slow. Seems like the last month has gotten worse. I understand about the need to upgrade, but outages is not the issue. Slow response time is.
You have a great tool, and combined with my IPod Touch app makes it invaluable. But if it continues to be slow I will go find another solution. Mike (Pro Subscription) |
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