Ugh, someone needs to tell the guys at feedburner they need more server horsepower. Their performance (both statistics and RSS feed response time) has really taken a major nose dive since I last used their services - variable performance and irregular page time-outs are bad, mkay?! Sadly another case of “great concept let down by crummy performance”.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of No Tags.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Jun 15th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
Hi Brendan, I’m sorry you’re experiencing issues with FeedBurner. We do a nightly rollup of our statistics table that runs here, well, nightly. Of course, with a global service, one person’s middle of the night is another person’s middafternoon, etc. As our service has grown in the last few months, we have more and more folks around the world using the service and our nightly rollups are now proving occasionally annoying to other users who are inconvenienced by the extra load these put on the system. We are in the process of refactoring the nightly rollups so that they don’t ever affect anybody’s system performance. As a function of refactoring this, stats pages should also load faster for everybody everywhere. This work should be done in the next week, and our international users will be the judge of how well this improves the experience.
Jun 15th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Dick,
Thanks for the feedback.
It is heartening to hear work is progressing to reduce load.
I started using feedburner late last year, shortly before wordpress gained enclosure support. I’ve only recently reverted back to using feedburner and have noticed quite a sizeable change in performance.
There are periods when the service is, quite frankly, excellent, however that is a little let down by performance issues.
Look forward to seeing the results of the proposed changes. :)
Jun 15th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Hi Brendan, ok, starting tonight (or this afternoon for you), you should no longer see a response time slowdown on any requests between 5pm and 9pm your time. That’s part one. Starting sunday, i believe, you should then also start seeing a significant speed up in stats page requests. We’ll stay on top of this.
Jun 19th, 2005 at 5:25 am
Erm,
Ok - while overall speed seems to have improved a little, I’m still getting a lot of errors when viewing the statistic graphs, which would indicate the server(s) are still loaded pretty heavily. It’s extremely frustrating to have to continuously force a refresh in Firefox due to graph generation timing out.
This occurred only occasionally a few months ago - now it’s occurring very frequently. The same thing happens in Internet Explorer as well.
I’ve found feedburner to be great overall, but time-outs like this really kills enthusiasm for the product. While I have considered a paid account - right now I just don’t feel it’s worth that kind of money, unless one lives in the US.
It is good your trying to improve the service, that impresses me greatly, but ultimately the merits don’t outweigh the frustration of having to piss ass around just to view stats (the images have to render correctly for any statistical data).
Have you ever considered separating out the actual data (in textual form) from the graphs?