Over the past 12 days, if you’ve ventured over to Liquidicity you may been a little disappointed to see a blank page telling you that we’ve been “having a break”. We apologise for this. However, that apology isn’t satisfactory unless you know why it happened and what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So here goes…
What’s up? What’s down?
We were a little startled when we woke up to find our stats showing just 300 visitors for whole day, in fact I am sure you know the feeling if you’ve ever owned a site yourself. We immediately looked into the reasons for our low level of traffic, and it didn’t take us long to realise we were down. Our first intention was to work out why were down, and then to try and get back online before too many people noticed.
Unfortunately, we didn’t go down due to our server being overloaded with excessive numbers of Digg users, or Stumblers, or even Twitter followers. Not that it’s acceptable to go offline when you get a sudden popularity increase, but it’s better than going offline for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Obviously, there was a reason for going offline, but it wasn’t a reason that could be found by looking at the Digg homepage. In fact, the reason for our down time continued to puzzle us for days.
We established that the problem was nothing to do with the levels of traffic we were receiving, so we tried disabling the entire site and then re-enabling certain parts of GoSquared in turn to see what was causing our server’s resources to be completely consumed. We eventually managed to isolate the problem to Liquidicity. We anxiously enabled Liquidicity again and kept a close eye on all server and traffic activity on Liquidicity. We were expecting to see a large number of visitors reaching a certain page or file that forced the server to process excessive amounts of information, or at least a steady build up of resource usage that culminated in the server giving up at full capacity. But we saw none of these common signs. Instead, after a few hours, Liquidicity appeared to simply stop, and any traffic reaching the site after that point was simply met by wonderfully unattractive “Server not Responding” error.
Priorities
Our main priority was to ensure the main GoSquared site, that hosts the GoSquared Ad Network was online. When our Ad Network suffers downtime, currently it can cause Sites that show Squares to also suffer slow response times, and in the worst of cases can cause Sites on the Network to go offline. Obviously, this is the last thing we could possibly want – the Sites on our Network mean everything to us, and we owe them the best service we can possibly provide.
As we have mentioned before, we are working on the next major version of GoSquared – it’s taking much longer than expected, but we are rethinking everything from the core. The next version of GoSquared will not only be a lot faster for all Sites on the Network, but we are doing everything to ensure that problems with the GoSquared site do not affect the entire GoSquared Ad Network.
Why so Ugly?
As you can see, Liquidicity is back up (which we’re pleased to say) but it’s looking the worst it ever has (which we’re not so pleased to say).
Why have we got the default theme on here? We’ve further isolated the problem to a file contained in the theme we created for Liquidicity a few weeks ago. We’re still trying to work out exactly what it is in that file that is causing such a hiccup to occur, and until then, we’re afraid you’re going to have to put up with this “classic” WordPress design.
Essentially, we would prefer to get our resources and articles back online and available for consumption rather than show absolutely nothing.
We hope you understand while we fix the problem. The Liquidicity you know will be back soon.
Update
We’ve managed to get the Liquidicity theme back, so things are almost entirely back to normal. We’re not showing feed subscribers and we have a few other plug-ins disabled currently, but other than that it should be service as usual. Thanks again for your patience.
Apologies, and thanks for your patience,
The GoSquared Team
