Website Slowness Issue on Sunday

Hello everyone,

We apologize for the slow website on Sunday.  We came in to this season with 35% traffic growth, so we bumped our server power by 40% to accommodate. We made the same adjustments last year where we also saw similar growth, but this time it obviously wasn’t enough.

Action Plan

1. We have identified several database queries that have now been dramatically improved. These should have a meaningful impact since they center around the slowest pages, namely the My Pick page and the Pickem & Confidence Standings pages. On the test site we already see at least 10-fold improvement in the My Picks page and expect similar results on the Standings pages for Pickem & Confidence leagues (surivor Standings pages remain a problem and ideas how to hande them, especially for 200+ size leagues, are being investigated).
2. As an additional measure, early Monday morning (2am to 4am) we boosted the server an additional 20%, which makes the server over 60% more powerful than last year.
3. We will have third party monitoring assistance this Sunday in case the above measure are not enough, that we hope can pinpoint any additional problems that cause the slowdown.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Fred WIlliams

"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers!"

While the most dramatic improvements are covered in item #1 of the opening post, we've completed the following additional changes that will provide some further relief on our server:

1. Processor-heavy page 'Career Stats' will not be accessible during peak NFL hours on Sunday. Depending on the age and size of the league, such heavy database activity can occupy processing cycles that are better used elsewhere. This page is generally not a problem, but several instances were observed to be active during the slow time on Sunday.
2. The Survivor Standings, Survivors tab page now defaults to top 10 players only. If the ‘Show all’ option is clicked, it will be ignored if CPU usage is detected as high.
3. The Survivor Standings, Player Picks page checks CPU usage and if high, a ‘server busy’ message will be shown if the page isn’t already cached in memory.

"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers!"