4 Engine Planes
A decade or more ago, aviation folks were studying whether it was safer to fly with 2 engines or 4 on a plane. The thinking was that 4 engines were better than 2 because then you could lose 75% of your power and still fly or land safely. Years later, they learned a valuable lesson: 4 engines are twice as likely to break than 2 engines… meaning, if you have 4 engines instead of 2, you just increased the number of engines that can fail. Today, it’s widely known that 2 engine planes are safer than 4 engine planes because there are 2 less engines to break, right?
How does this relate to EzineArticles.com you ask?
We’re a 4 engine plane today, webserver wise.
Technically, we’ve got more than that…but that’s what I can share for now. It was a necessary step in our evolution, but the 4 engine plane analogy doesn’t necessary apply to load balanced webservers because of the built in redundancy of an array of servers. Should one die, red rover takes over to send traffic to the rest of the team.
We spent the last 2 months taking a giant step backwards to completely redesign the hardware and software that runs this site… all in the name of SPEED and open new doors to functionality that was not possible previously without a speed sacrifice.
Stirring the pot, so to speak, has caused fragments of confusion, small outages here and there, and a few more expected unplanned consequences of making these improvements until we return to a less bumpy 50k feet flying altitude. Sorry about the consequences of these improvements as they were necessary for this website project to grow.
I do have one question about your current perception of how fast our site is:
Over the past week vs. all of last year or at least the last quarter, have you noticed that surfing EzineArticles.com is
A) Significantly Faster
B) Faster
C) The Same
D) Slower
E) Significantly Slower?
C) The Same
I’m using IE on a DSL connection. Seems about the same to me.
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