Performance woes
The good news is that Fab Swingers is really taking off in a huge way with our page views increasing by a million a month (for the last 3 months and for this month too by the look of it so far) and hits are increasing by between 3 million and 5 million a month (hits are useless as a measure of popularity but VERY useful as a measure of server load).
The first problem I have is that I’m about to be thrown off the free Google Analytics as you’re only allowed 5 million page views a month unless you are an AdSense customer. I’ll probably just run a fairly minimal campaign.
The second problem is that Python is really hogging the CPU (Apache and MySQL are fine). On a bit of investigation this is mainly down to SQLObject. SQLObject is an absolutely brilliant piece of software but it’s really only a problem when you’re trying to wring every last drop of performance out of your system. In virtually any environment the programmer productivity benefit would trump the need to beef up the hardware but in the case of Fab Swingers with our tiny ARPU we really need to be at the Plenty of Fish performance levels.
I also think that it would help a lot if I could deploy CherryPy through mod_python rather than using mod_rewrite but I think I’d like to do this after fixing the SQL.
Unfortunately I’m just so short of time at the moment that I’m really not sure I’m going to get a chance to do much work on the site. I think I’ve got about another 2 months to get the performance improved otherwise I’m going to have to throw some hardware at it — which I’m really not keen to do right now.
Aside from the performance I think I’m also going to be bitten on the arse because I’m not very good at handling bouncing email. This needs to be done automatically, if we continue to send email to duff addresses we’ll end up being black listed.
I guess it is a positive that the last few blog posts have been whines about coping with the extra load rather than worries about generating the traffic — I guess this is a good problem to have!