This morning a large update was pushed live to the servers geared towards improving performance.

We began writing MMO Guildsites way back in January 2006 and it was overdue for some house-cleaning of our code base. We trimmed some unnecessary fat, re-factored many core components and generally put a lot of polish on the underlying code for MMO Guildsites.

In reaching for better performance we tried a new strategy also; previously each "block", such as a shoutbox, server status block, text block, etc., was pulled in separately as a component after the site. This meant each page view took longer to load as each block had to be pulled in after the site's main content. We decided to try and remove that delay by pulling everything in as one request; it worked great while testing but when we moved it to the live server.... it failed horribly >_<

Each guild site can be very dynamic, it not only pulls in the content you want to view but the theme and layout for the site, each block and its content, and your user and permissions. Attempting to ball it all up into one request gobbled up oodles of memory and caused our web server to throw a fit.

In the end we had to undo that part of the update, it resulted in a fair amount of server issues this afternoon which was very unfortunate and I hope never put a damper on anyone's weekend.