Someone asked on the innercircle list about load issues on vanadium. This was my response. I thought I'd post it here, too.
With so much happening on the servers, questions like this are kind of hard to answer. I generally have a hunch what the problem is when something goes wrong, and on vanadium I have my suspicions about one site in particular.
Short answer: I'll play around with this site and see if I can bring it in line. I added an issue for this here:
https://secure.sabren.com/roundup/issue11
Long answer: To really handle the general case, we need to be able to separate special cause problems ("comment spammers are sending 10 million spams a second and crippling the server") vs general problems (average traffic on all sites has grown and high loads have become the norm).
It seems like it would be easy to tell the difference, but it really isn't. What we really need is a statistical model that shows how each server behaves in general, not just at one particular moment (during a comment spam attack or whatever).
I've been reading a lot of quality and statistics books (six sigma, etc) and trying to wrap my head around this stuff.
From now on, I'm treating server performance as mission critical (right up there with support response time). Things are a long way from perfect on both ends, but I'm working on it.
BTW, if you didn't notice that URL, I've set up a new issue system based on roundup. :)
You guys can log in with your cornerhost accounts and make comments or sign up for email updates on issues by adding your name to the "nosy" list. This is a work in progress and only for "public" issues right now, but eventually it'll handle support too. The top level link is here:
https://secure.sabren.com/roundup/
I also wrote a post about the tracker over on my blog.
