NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover
At 10:31 a.m. this morning, we received two questions from a NewsOK visitor. Here’s the first part:
do you realize your website is completely unusable today?
Yes – we realized that we were suffering from site performance problems for a significant part of the morning today. It was bad timing, since we were prepared for a massive traffic surge after the Sooners’ loss to Florida last night in the BCS National Championship game.
After a lot of research from our programming, development and server administration teams, we found the culprit … the massive amount of traffic on our main article, coupled with the massive amount of comments made on that article, led to unforeseen overload on our database servers.
Basically, the volume of traffic caused some of our users to experience issues trying to load our Web site. The “nuance” has been adjusted. And the extremely occasional unforeseen problem is a byproduct of being the largest Web site in Oklahoma that is growing at a remarkable rate.
(And when I write “occasional unforeseen problem,” I mean it. Our site-disruption rate would rank well with any site in the world.)
We don’t want it to happen again and are taking additional steps to find unforeseen issues.
And now for the trick question – the second part of our visitor’s question.
how can a news organization be this inept?
Um … nice try. I’ll have to re-phrase before I can answer.
Seriously, I don’t blame this person for being frustrated. I’m certain many other visitors were equally frustrated. And they had every right to be.
But trust me when I say that I doubt your frustration matched our own as we investigated the issue. We pride ourselves on delivering information to the world when you want it.
You demand it. We deliver it. That’s the deal.
That is our goal on a lazy July day, and it’s our goal on a busy post-national championship day. It will be our goal tomorrow.
Regardless, please try us again. I promise that all the content is still there now if you couldn’t get it before – as are the 600-plus reader comments on the primary OU-Florida article. Sorry you couldn’t get it when you demanded it.
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