Just wanted to send out a public thank you and well done to the entire b5tech team! They’ve been absolutely under the gun for the last two monts, and have pulled miracle after miracle straight out of their asses.

The team (Aaron, Gary, Sean, Brian, Ben and the contractors) have had massive scaling issues to face of late. We’d always built everything to kinda-sorta scale at b5. Y’know, we could handle 100%+ traffic spikes, were adding servers every month, etc. But we started to hit some bottle-necks last month, and the team’s been working their asses off to keep the network up and to really improve stuff.

Sean (our part-time server ninja) has a great post up about the latest set of challenges around our internal API (that feeds all the dynamic bits, like the blogroll, new footers, channel homepages, etc). Basically the API was generating roughly 100 requests/second, and the team totally rewrote the API and software that taps into it to effectively eliminate this using some wicked caching.

Truth be told, the whole company is firing on all cylinders like we never have before. I could write a post every day about the awesome things people are doing, and I’d never really get caught up. But, given what the b5tech team’s been through, a huge, massive and public thank you was the last I could do!