Since its launch two weeks ago, we have been able to discover firsthand that Adobe Reader 9 is an amazingly effective device for generating traffic – twice as good as we expected it to be, in fact. So much so that it is generating more traffic than our servers can handle, and as a result performance has been poor. I want to apologize to anyone who used our service over these last few weeks and had a bad experience. Last night we deployed a new build that has improved things some, but not as much as I’d like. Another release is coming next week which will improve things even more. I’d offer subscription extensions like Apple did with MobileMe but since its 100% free that is kind of moot…
I also have to pass on this scalability post from Ted Dziuba (via Stefan Tikov via Jeff Atwood), which I found very funny (and yet so true) in my punch drunk state: I’m Going to Scale My Foot Up Your Ass.
Unless you know what you need to scale to, you can’t even begin to talk about scalability. How many users do you want your system to handle? A thousand? Hundred thousand? Ten million? Here’s a hint: the system you design to handle a quarter million users is going to be different from the system you design to handle ten million users.
Amen, brother. Subscribed.
