MochiBot Blog

It’s been a long two weeks since our database crashed, but we worked arduously to recover and made several improvements to MochiBot along the way. As I said before we had to remove “unique” counts from all reports, but in exchange you’ll experience a must faster and more reliable site. You can also count on seeing new daily reports an hour or two after midnight Pacific Standard Time instead of having to wait an entire day. Overall there have been some major performance improvements to the site so we hope that the wait has been worthwhile for everyone.

And now that the site has been upgraded, tested, and stability assured we can finally go out and throw back some cold ones. Cheers!

Sorry for the unresponsive site as of late, but we’re still recovering from the database crash last week. We’ve been growing a lot in both users and traffic so we’re making a few changes to the system to accommodate this growth. In the past week we’ve been faced with several tough decisions on how to best serve our existing members. Ultimately system performance and reliability is the key to our success so we decided to remove “unique viewers” data from the reports since they consume the greatest amount of resources in data processing. Our decision stemmed from a recent survey of our members which indicated that “uniques” data was not as important as having a fast site and quick reports.

For those of you who do consume the “uniques” data we intend on bringing the data back in the future as a premium service. We eventually have to charge for something in the future so this will be our first step in implementing a premium membership. No milestones have been set as to when the premium membership will launch, but we’ll start making plans once these fixes are complete.

The new changes to the system will be finished by the end of the week August 4 soon :-|. We’ll make an announcement once everything is tested and back in order. With the removal of “uniques” data the system will perform much more reliably and quickly. We’re working hard to provide the community with a quality service so we hope this compromise improves your experience with MochiBot.

We take all your feedback into consideration as we grow so please keep all those emails coming. Please send your emails to feedback@mochibot.com.

The site and reports are running slow right now because we experienced an unfortunate database crash yesterday. Luckily we’re running two databases and have lots of backups so we’re busy today putting things back together. It’s going to take another day or two to get the new database up and running so please be patient while the site is a bit slow.

MochiBot will continue to track all of your stats and traffic during this time, but it’s just going to take a couple days to process the data while we work on the system.

Thanks for your patience!

Some of you might notice a drop in your traffic at around 1pm yesterday. We made some changes to the core yesterday and it didn’t capture the traffic for several SWFs. Sorry to those those who were affected. We’ve rolled back the changes and things are back to normal again. The fix wasn’t put into place until 11am PST today so the stats that you see tomorrow will have a portion of its data missing for the first half of the day.

We’ll be making some minor tweaks to the system this week so the processing of all stats will be a bit delayed. Stats will take longer than usual to process while we’re working on the system.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The stats will be at 0 for yesterday while we work on some bugs that were caused by daylight savings time.

**UPDATE (Apr 06, 2006 @ 5:04pm PST) : Stats are back on again.

The log processor decided to not cooperate last night so we’re back under the hood fixing things again. Looks like another long weekend for us so we’ll see everyone back here on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

** UPDATE - March 9, 2006 @ 2:34pm PST ** Ok that wasn’t so bad. We fixed the problem to yesterday’s stats not showing up. That doesn’t mean we won’t still have a lot to do over the weekend though. doh!

It’s been a long three days, but things are back to normal again and running smoother than ever. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on things just to make sure that everything is ok.

If you notice any quirks or bugs, then please feel free to let us know.

As you all have noticed your stats have been at 0 since Sunday. It pains me greatly to write these posts because it’s like talking about an injured son or daughter. We’re working tirelessly to fix the issue, but it’s proven to be much more daunting than we anticipated. To give you an idea of the magnitude of what we’re dealing with we’ve been taking in about 9GB of raw data every day (that translates to a hell of a lot of hits from your Flash movies). We then take that data and have to process, filter, sort, and store all of that information within a small window of time so that you can see your reports on the site. However, the processing time was taking too long (several hours) so we had to shut the processor off in order to do some work on it and speed things up.

If you have MochiBot in your Flash and are concerned about the data not showing in your reports, then let me put your mind at ease. We’re still collecting all of the information that your MochiBot sends to us, but it just hasn’t been processed yet. Once we get things up and running again you’ll see all of the stats that were captured over the past few days.

Thanks to everyone for their emails of support and appreciation of what we’re doing. This is our flesh and blood and we’re committed to making MochiBot the best that it can be.

I’ll keep posting updates as we make more progress.

We’re running through some changes with the system right now so your stats will all be at 0 or at least near 0. If you need to look at your stats, then check out the Traffic Report to see how your Flash has performed in days prior to yesterday.

Sorry for the inconvenience as we’ll have them up and running again soon.