Minor Missives

Rich Jacobson, beloved Community Builder and consummate crabber, was rushed to the hospital late last night after a daring raid on an Upper Manhattan condo left him seriously injured. Police have refused to comment, citing the ongoing investigation, but our sources claim he was violently attacked with a set of bongo drums. In an unlikely turn of events, eye witnesses claimed to have seen Matthew McConaughey streaking from the scene.

Federal investigators are still questioning inmates and staff at the facility where Rich was being held. It is thought that he simply walked out after (politely) asking the guard to open the door.

The motive for Rich's late night sortie are unknown, but many industry pundits believe he was seeking the missing Blogs link. A small but vocal minority have also suggested dementia.

This is an ongoing story… stayed tuned for live, late-breaking updates.

Update (10/11/2008 @ 3:01pm PST): Hospital officials have released Rich's condition as stable. Uncorroborated reports are suggesting that Rich's midnight incursion was successful, and that the Blogs link is due to be delivered to ActiveRain headquarters in mere minutes. A substantial crowd has gathered outside his room, waving flags and banging cowbells in celebration.

(Baffled? Read the prologue to this crazy tale at http://activerain.com/blogsview/734107/Ch-ch-ch-ch)

The dreaded Proxy Error. You've all seen them. Some have lost posts or comments to this scourge. Others have smashed their keyboard in frustration. Almost daily, Bob bellows boldly at me in the office: THE SITE IS DOWN! FIX IT!

What is a Proxy Error? Imagine that you've gotta go – now! You excuse yourself and fly to the restroom — only to find every toilet occupied. You wait a few seconds and do a desperate little dance, but it's too late. Hoping nobody noticed, you flee, face burning with hot shame.

During our peak load times, ActiveRain experiences a similar phenomenon. Our servers would like nothing better than to fulfill your request, but there are already 100 people in front of you. By the time your request reaches the front of the queue, our proxy/load balancer has decided that you (and everyone behind you!) has been waiting too long, and unceremoniously boots you from the line with a… Proxy Error. It doesn't sound fair, but it frees the server to continue processing requests instead of sending constant error messages. Someone with strange ears once said that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

What are we doing about it? In our previous example, imagine that someone was monopolizing a toilet while reading a magazine. You'd be outraged! Some pages on ActiveRain take orders of magnitude longer to generate than others. When enough people (or search engines) visit those pages simultaneously, our servers get tied up and can't process your request. At the highest level, we're identifying and fixing those pages.

Bah! You're just making excuses! ActiveRain is a simple site! I could fix your problems in an hour! When ActiveRain was first being developed, we had no idea that we'd be the leading social network for real estate professionals. We couldn't imagine hitting 111k+ members. Much of our code still works under the assumptions of that quainter, quieter time when we had a mere handful of users. My top priority has been to find and optimize that code. Fun fact: Last week, we deployed performance-related fixes to ActiveRain every night!

To our members: thank you! You've placed us in this enviable position. ActiveRain is too popular. We're a happy victim of success. Work will continue in earnest to stamp out the last of the error messages; already, we're seeing fewer reports, but even one error is too many. Your collective patience and gentle humor have been appreciated, and I'm proud to be a part of this community. Now, unsurprisingly, I'm headed back work!