Status Report

It’s been a rough past couple of weeks here in the ‘Lounge. There’s been too much radio silence here in the blog lately, so I thought I’d at least give a status update.

Problem #1 - Scott and I miscalculated how long we’d be able to survive on the temporary alpha box. This was due to a number of factors, probably the largest being that the alpha users each have an average of 74 unique feeds. The current box can barely handle refreshing all these feeds, so it doesn’t serve the web interface well at all right now.

Problem #2 - We hit database scalability issues a little sooner than we thought. The only good news here is that we’re also addressing them sooner than we thought and have a number of solutions planned.

Problem #3 - An unfortunate series of events led to a reduced amount of available time for development over the last month.

Problem #4 - We didn’t get access to the data center to install our real servers when we expected. We should be in there this weekend finally.

Problem #5 - Taking care of business. A number of opportunities and proposals have come our way since we’ve announced the alpha. These are all great things, but they do take time.

While we didn’t expect all of these problems, we knew we’d have some and that was the reason we decided to make our initial release a private alpha. Our alpha users have been amazingly patient during the process, and we are extremely grateful for that.

Note to alpha users: if you need to grab your OPML for use somewhere else at the moment, we completely understand. You can grab it here:

http://my.feedlounge.com/export/opml

That was the ugly bad news - now for the good news.

There is a lot of cause for optimism moving forward. It’s been painful how it’s happened, but we’ve identified the main areas we need to optimize so that FeedLounge can scale well as a service - and we’re making those changes.

The new hardware will also solve a lot of problems. We did a re-load of our database on the current alpha server about a week ago and it took 16+ hours. A full load of the same database on the new database server took 20 minutes. Throwing hardware at a problem is not always a good solution, but having suitable hardware for your application is certainly a good idea.

Here is a rough schedule of things to come:

• Friday night we’ll be taking down the current FeedLounge alpha server. Poor little box, it’s earned a vacation.
• By early next week, we’ll be up on our new servers in the new data center.
• Once we’re comfortable that everything is running smoothly with the new hardware and location, we’ll be doing some serious QA on the new version of FeedLounge we currently have in-house and we’ll be pushing that out when it’s ready.
• More releases to follow, including great new features, many of the optimizations we’ve got planned and the additional service infrastructure we need to support going to a wider release.
• The long awaited beta release!

Good things are coming, stay tuned.