SparkPeople Technology Update
State of the Spark Address #2 (November 2006)
-- By Chris 'SparkGuy' Downie
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I’m back again for the second State of the Spark Address. The topic of today’s address—updating our website technology—puts me in a very good mood.
New Servers Installed!
SparkPeople.com has now entered the major leagues in terms of website traffic, according to my team and our high level outside consultants. As many people had noticed, the growth this year was placing a strain on the site and causing slowdowns during busy times. I apologize for any slowdowns you experienced. But, I’m happy to report that we have been working hard on building the new server architecture. For those of you not familiar with them, servers are just special computers that handle all the visitors to the site.
We needed to build a new server architecture that could handle all of our existing visitors, but also be easily expanded upon to support future growth.
This past weekend, we successfully switched over to the new servers! Josh, our Senior Vice President of Engineering, was at the server location until about 4 a.m. making the switch after many hours of preparation.
When I tried the site Monday morning, it was like getting a new toy because the site was running so fast! This makes me happy because it will improve your experience as well.
