Upgrading ActiveRain to Improve Performance

ActiveRain is a great and special place on the Internet due to the power of the ActiveRain community.  Our community is very active and we produce a significant amount of original content each month in the form of original blog posts, comments, and now reviews.  Each month we are creating close to 200,000 user generated pieces of content (blog posts, comments and reviews).  Right now, we have more than 5 million pages indexed by Google and the 3,500,000th blog post was recently written.

All this content requires regular maintenance of our database and system to improve & tune performance.

As many have noticed, ActiveRain has been having performance issues late at night and early in the morning.  We apologize for the inconveniences that this has caused.  We know that mornings and evenings can be the best blogging times, BUT we do have a plan that we are rolling out to improve performance, particularly database performance.

Over the next two weeks, we will be doing the following to (hopefully) improve performance and the speed of ActiveRain:

• Archiving obsolete data (not blog posts)
• Reducing the number of times ActiveRain fetches data
• Streamlining the amount of data ActiveRain fetches
• Reduce the number of calculations ActiveRain makes on a periodic basis
• Introduce more effective methods of blocking the hackers / spammers 

Two points to call out:

1. We will be deleting the notifications that appear on the “My Home” page that are older than six months.  Contact messages and lead referral alerts and requests will be kept indefinitely while all other notifications will now only be kept for six months.   i.e.  If Steve Shatsky left a comment on your blog two years ago, we will be deleting the notification that he left that comment from your MyHome page.  THE ACTUAL COMMENT REMAINS (I personally have never looked at a comment notification older than a day or a week at most.) 
    
2. As the Internet has become more and more of a global phenomena, we are seeing more attempts at spamming & crawling ActiveRain content.  These spammers and nefarious crawlers can also slow down ActiveRain as the number of simultaneous database requests can increase in a short period of time.  We are going to be increasing our network security and testing more ways to deal with SPAM.

Again, we know that ActiveRain is a core piece of your real estate business and your daily lives.  We are doing what it takes to improve the performance and responsiveness of ActiveRain. 

 

Niki

 

Image via Creative Commons from Flickr

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