One of the joys of running a site that is driven by a database is expanding a site to the point where it is causing the database server to crash on a regular basis due to the traffic you receive. This is exactly what happened with our article directory.
The first thing we did was identify the problem, which we disabled the pages that were causing the problem. Then we worked to move the database from one server to a new server that also runs a newer version of MySql. As mentioned before we host with Mosso and have the database on a cluster (a group of servers). One cluster runs the mysql and another cluster runs the php, and a SAN stores the data. As a result, each server has its own job in the piece of the puzzle of putting together a page view on ArticleSnatch.
Fortunately during the time that it took to move the site from one cluster to another, we only had downtime with the tag pages and the search result pages. The rest of the site remained unaffected for the most part. Fortunately now that it is moved, everything works again, and it is a lot faster. We have implemented several code improvements to increase performance of the site and will continue to make more improvements over the next few weeks.
If you have suggestions for improvements, features, comments, or something you would like to see removed from the site, please feel free to use the contact form and let us know. We love to hear from our users.
I am glad to hear you work on improving your directory! So many directory owners don’t care about the performance of the site, just what kind of income they can get off it. They do not realize the income would be better if the site functioned better.
I assume, that in the future the site will function better!!!