Is there a reason Pownce is down more than usual today?
It's getting to the point where many people are defecting to other sites. I really have tried to defend the site, especially after my last post here (and Ariel's response). It has been better than usual lately, but for some reason today, the site has been down more often than it has been up.
Yes, I am aware of the API problem that happened earlier today, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the current problems. I think some of us would appreciate hearing something - ANYTHING - about what the problems are and how quickly you expect to have them fixed. I've been checking the blog, and we haven't heard much of anything, really.
I have been a big defender of you since the last time something happened. I can put up with periodic white pages, personally, but I'm not sure how long that will last for the rest of the general population. I know I'm upset about the lack of acknowledgment of this particular problem. Even a blog post about the outage would have helped. So since I can't post a response to the blog, I'll post here. Can you please let us know what in the world is going on right now?
Pownce is down again and will not load. Things were working fine this morning, but the site will not load this afternoon. Has there been any headway into fixing this issue? We have not had any communication from the developers in the past few days. Please learn from the mistakes of your competitor, Twitter. They now regularly update their users with problems and fixes via their blog. A little communication goes a long way.
Ariel recently mentioned that some of these "white pages of deaths" are caused by API users "abusing the system," whether intentional or not. She followed by explaining that they monitor for this and ban the IP if they see this happening.
So, Pownce team, have you guys thought about throttling instead of banning? You could do this automatically instead of having to manually watch for IPs to ban. It would certainly allow the developers of applications that use the API a chance to easily recognize the issue that their application is having an implement some sort of better efficiency (caching, or whatever they must do to cause lets hits against the database). At that, you could whitelist certain IP addresses to make sure that they are not throttled if you have previous arrangements with certain developers, or if you're not comfortable with completely relieving them of the throttle, you could place them in a special case class that could raise their throttle amount.
I realize that this is not the entire white page of death issue and that this may take some work to implement (or you may already have it implemented, I do not use the Pownce API), but if not it may serve as a way to help prevent these issues from occurring in the first place and allowing Pownce and its community a true chance to thrive.
(I'll stop being such a wind bag now that I've gotten that out of my head.)
Loading Profile...
Cursor_
last replied
on July 14, 2008 07:38
Ariel Waldman (Employee)
last replied
on June 30, 2008 21:59
