Over the past few months, Chihuahua, Letterbox and our other websites have disappeared from the Internet on three occasions, for periods ranging from a day or two to a week. Judging from the comments received, this has been especially distressing to regular Chihuahua players, who have become accustomed to their daily (or more frequent) dose. And of course it's quite distressing to me, because I don't like to disappoint people.
I'm quietly confident that the sites will be more stable from now on. We are using a new Web hosting service, with a good reputation for performance and reliability. And we've re-designed the Chihuahua back-end processing to guard against the type of problem we've been experiencing.
So let's hope we're in for some smooth sailing from now on. The rest of this post will go into some of the details of our problems, in case anyone is interested.
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The first and longest interruption was caused by sheer negligence on the part of our then hosting service. We got going again using a different hosting service, but after only a couple of weeks, they suspended our account, claiming the Chihuahua software was overloading the server. The suspension was lifted with a warning, and I made some changes to the Chihuahua script to reduce its impact on the system. Then last week the hosting service shut us down again, this time for good. (We're now running with yet another hosting service: the third one - are you following this?)
When a friend heard about these problems he said, "That's great! You can say Chihuahua's so popular it crashed the server." Being more of an IT person than a marketing person, I would have to regard crashing the server as a failure, not an achievement. But I don't really believe Chihuahua was the ultimate cause of problems on the server, on either occasion. However, given a drastic slowdown caused by some other factor, Chihuahua can look like the culprit because requests to the server come in very frequently (every time someone plays a word). Each request is normally handled in a fraction of a second, but if the computer has slowed almost to a stop, they can start to bank up, and it might look like the system is being strangled by a multitude of Chihuahua processes. And it's probably not a total coincidence that the latest incident occurred at the peak time of the Chihuahua day - just after the new daily puzzles appeared, when Big Ben has just finished chiming 12 midnight.
At any rate, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the argument I had with the previous hosting service (rather a one-sided agrgument, as I argued while they just ignored me), the site was vulnerable to such accusations, so I've implemented a new scheme of buffering and single-streaming back-end transactions which should prevent any repeat of these problems.
From the player's point of view, the only difference will be that the scores of other players won't be updated quite as often. But any time you want to be absolutely sure of seeing an up-to-date scoreboard, you can click the refresh button at the top of the scoreboard.
The software changes seem to be working smoothly, but please let me know if you notice anything not working properly. And thanks for your continued support.
