You might think this is another techy post. It is not. However, Sean’s is and describes the amazing job the tech team did in driving a concept that needed to be driven, to finished and polished production code in three days flat. This saved our servers, I can assure you as, for several weeks we’ve been killing ourselves trying to find the source of massive CPU bind-ups and server crashes.

Over at b5media we have some internal code that ties all the blogs together to make us a network. This was initially implemented as a brilliant little REST API, only requiring minor changes in some database tables that could completely alter how the network was arranged. Additional functionality could be added easily to the API, and all the sites could make use of it.

All was good until we started noticing things were slowing down. Web slaves were CPU bound, and we were consumed with hits to the API. Stepping back and looking at what was going on, we soon realized that REST was an inefficient way of achieving what we needed at the volume we needed.

For the rest, you have to read Sean’s story about what we did. Great job, guys!

I’ll add one other bit, this chart, that describes the past 24 hours since we pushed the second half of the code changes. Notice the sharp decline in TCP connections to our primary database server around 6pm last night. Sweet, huh?