One part of the maintenance was running ridiculously slow. At first, I thought it was just taking a bit of time to complete the maintenance, but I noticed that the site was being affected. As I assessed the situation, performance on the site was getting worse. About the same time as I decided to take YackTrack down during the maintenance, the site became unresponsive (how convenient). Once the site was down, I was able to figure out the reason for the slow running maintenance.

What was the real problem? I was trying to cut corners, as most people do for simple things like routine database maintenance. I was trying to implement some performance enhancements, and I figured that some other maintenance could wait until next weekend. If I had thought things through, and did not try to quickly implement my changes, I would have seen that the performance improvements really required some other maintenance. Specifically, I would have seen that the maintenance I postponed until next weekend was really required for my performance improvements. So, I corrected the situation by completing the basic maintenance that I hoped to postpone and then implemented the performance improvements, which ran much quicker this time.

The moral of the story is, there is no such thing as a quick fix and do not try to cut corners when you know better. The database maintenance that I was trying to postpone only required 15 minutes to complete. The performance improvements then required another 30 minutes. However, I wasted almost 5 hours trying to cut corners, and I had to take the site down for a few hours as well.

Again, I apologize for the downtime, the lack of communication prior to the maintenance and for any inconvenience this may have caused. In the future, I will be writing a short blog post to notify everyone of any maintenance, and trying to ensure I do not cut any corners.

So, a better foundation has been laid down. There is still work to do, but there is a much better plan in place. Some things which looked like they would be almost impossible to add, are now possible.

However, when decisions are made, sometimes they do not go in favor of the user. The big change today is that only 13 months of history will be kept for free accounts. This change in data will occur over several days or weeks, depending on how much it affects the live service. Up to this point, I was trying to keep as much history as possible. This is just not cost effective for a free service. You may be asking why I said “free accounts”  or whether there are non-free accounts. Currently, there are no premium accounts, but it they have always been in the plan. There will be premium services in the near future, and longer history could be an option but I am not promising anything yet.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback or feature requests, please let me know.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I will update this post when I receive a notice that the servers are available again.

UPDATE: The servers are up again and YackTrack is back to normal. Thank you for your patience.

Identi.ca is now supported for both URL searches and Chatter searches. [Update: In some last minute testing, I found an issue with Identi.ca and URL searches so it will not go live.] This is just the first in a long line of services that need to be added. The search crawler has been updated as there was a defect where some searches were being updated more often than others. Blog comments are being handled a bit differently as well, so there should not be issues with pulling comments for the full feed from the site. This was pointed out recently because of the Lifehacker/DownloadSquad coverage. Otherwise, this update is more about the future. There is a significant amount of database maintenance that will be done that will cause the downtime. The maintenance is some general cleanup, as well as getting the database prepared for some new features that are planned.

So, I apologize for the inconvenience of the downtime, but hopefully it will allow me to present you with a better experience long term. Thank you as always for your support.

UPDATE 12PM – The maintenance is not going well. Various database issues, mainly because I figured this would be a simple process. So, please assume that YackTrack.com will be down for the rest of the day until I resolve all of the issues. I will let everyone know more information when I figure things out.

UPDATE 6PM – The maintenance is completed! Sorry for the ridiculous delays, but databases tend to be a problem just when you don’t want them to, just like children. So, things should be back to normal. If you see any problems please let me know, or email info AT yacktrack.com, or on twitter @yacktrack.

UPDATE 1/11 7AM – I had to pull support for Identi.ca as a whole. So there is no support for URL searches or Chatter searches. I am not sure what happened as it all seemed fine during testing and the first few minutes after the updates. I guess it was just par for what was happening yesterday.

In the next few weeks, I will be introducing very few new features or services. Most, if not all, of my time will be focused on better performance. Obviously, we are looking at various caching methods, but the focus needs to still be the future of the site. There are still some “big” features planned for YackTrack, and I want to ensure that I can add these features without causing more performance problems.

I apologize for any inconvenience the performance issues have caused, but hopefully the issues will be rectified soon. Also, thank you for your continued support and promotion of the site. I still say that YackTrack has the best users and this support has definitely made the development of YackTrack more fulfilling and exciting. So, keep an eye out for updates her on the blog.