Lately you may have noticed some service interruptions with 8aweek. No, it wasn't just your computer - it was in fact our servers. 8aweek has grown bigger and faster than we had anticipated, and this was causing some real growing pains for our database and server. As a result, it was hurting the performance for everyone using 8aweek.
To deal with this, we had to take some drastic measures. Our database was getting too large, collecting over a million browsing statistics every day, so we began constructing summary tables to hold the data in a much less resource intensive manner. We anticipated these new structures would increase performance of your habits page by 10x, and prevent the sporadic slowdowns you may have been noticing recently.
However, during the process of restructuring our database, some of the data was corrupted and destroyed, so your historical habits beyond the current day might be missing - however, the historical report card grades all remain. All your habits from here on out will be saved appropriately in the summary tables, and you should notice no difference except for faster performance!
We apologize for this hassle, and thanks to everyone for sticking with us through our growth spurt!
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Comments
1 Sh V (Israel) says...
It sounds very non professional. Loosing data is something that is I can't live with.
You should send! all the users a special message explaining what happened and not waiting for us to notice the problem, write to you and get a personal response.
Next time failures like this happen - I am out of 8aweek
Posted at 7:19 p.m. on April 8, 2008
2 Zack, co-founder says...
Losing data, and going through growing pains, are undesirable effects of creating a successful web application. We've been quite proud of the value and service we've provided with 8aweek, free of charge, for any user who wants it! We've found that thousands of people have been looking for the solution we provide, and we're happy to be affecting so many lives.
Our blog does serve as our system for communicating with our users. Given the size of our user base, it's impossible to send everyone an email directly. However, we respond personally to every feedback we receive, and we've received over 1,500 so far!
We'll continue to improve our services and reliability. Dave and I serve as the developers, businessmen, system administrators, and database administrators for 8aweek. That's a lot of hats to wear! We're learning fast as we go, but I'm sure we'll make a few more mistakes along the way. Fortunately, we do a lot of things right and provide a cool, free service that thousands of people love!
Posted at 8:55 a.m. on April 10, 2008
3 Josh says...
I'd have to agree with the original poster. Losing data is not a good sign. Though the nature of your site means that it is not a deal breaker :). It might not be possible to back up all data (or even necessary), but hopefully now you have your summary structure set up you could back that up.
It sounds like you were just logging and querying raw data in the past. Is this true? I can't ever see a site like yours working without a sharding setup.
The fact that you did lose data is more worrying than missing a few days worth of charts. It would be nice to know that you take the job of securing data seriously. If any of your data were ever to leak then there would definitely be some upset users. At the moment I am not sure whether a data leak would reveal what Google searches I have made, for example.
It would be nice to see a page detailing what you store from each user (do you log domains, full URLs, do you drop query strings, etc.) and any measures you put in place to safeguard the data.
Posted at 3:54 a.m. on April 21, 2008
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