I have been watching the new FeedLounge install with possibly too much attention today. Is that CPU spike a performance problem, or just a random spike? Where is that disk I/O going? Why is this machine loaded and that one mostly idle? You know the drill. Obsession to the point of losing a bit of the higher level picture.

As the obsession waned today, it seems that FeedLounge is back to an alive and usable state, and for that I am very happy. Now, however, is when the work really begins. In preparation for a larger (much larger, we hope) rollout in beta and beyond, I have to step back and start removing bottlenecks in the system. That is going to take quite a bit of measurement and design, and a lot of elbow grease to acclomplish correctly, lest we end up in the same position again, and very soon. I feel the pain of the Technoratis of the world.

I know where the current 80% problem(s) are in the architecture, and I will begin work of adding infrastructure, both in code and hardware, to alleviate the problem, so that I can then find the next 80%, and so on down the line. As FeedLounge continues to scale, I will also be putting into place key indicators to tell me when/where I may have a problem in the near future, rather than learn about yesterday’s scaling problem today.

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