Both the Primate Labs website and the Geekbench Browser have been busy today (thanks in part to the new MacBook Pros). While the Primate Labs website has handled the increased traffic without any problems, the Geekbench Browser has had some problems.
As a bit of background, the Geekbench Browser is a Ruby on Rails application, and Rails has a reputation for not scaling well. While this hasn't been a problem in the past (at least not for the Result Browser), it became a problem today when the Result Browser's traffic in an hour far exceeded the traffic it usually gets in a day. Yipes!
Here's what the load was like earlier today on the Result Browser's dedicated server:
[jfpoole@photek ~]$ uptime
17:01:33 up 11 days, 5:11, 1 user, load average: 13.89, 9.63, 6.24
After disabling a couple of resource-intensive features (like the browse similar feature), the load gradually settled down to something more reasonable:
[jfpoole@photek browse]$ uptime
17:10:58 up 11 days, 5:59, 2 users, load average: 2.41, 5.70, 8.32
While this is fine for a short-term fix, I'm going to have to make some changes to the Geekbench Browser so that it scales a bit better. I'm sure I could fix the problem by buying more server hardware, but I'd like to avoid doing that if at all possible!