I'd like to take this opportunity to clear up some of the issued raised in Steve's post, which is potentially misleading if taken at face value.
The servers themselves don't have "major problems" - we just don't have enough of them, frankly: Last week we lost a couple of servers - that happens sometimes - and didn't have the excess capacity online to provide the speedy service that should be the norm. The service continued to operate on our the many remaining servers, but the servers give second priority, when stressed, to historical data requests because that is less important than where the market is right now. Even Nasdaq does this - quotes take precedence over trade reports in their feed when it gets overloaded. So a new request for a new chart might take a minute or two to download - But it eventually would arrive.
We have enough capacity to handle current normal loads, but we do not have the excess capacity in production to handle abnormal situations such as when our ISP repeatedly disconnected one of our server farms from the internet over a period of 7 trading days in November, or when we lose 50% of the servers on one of our farms as happened this week. We are working to increase the capacity of our current servers, to increase the number of servers at each farm, and are increasing eventually to four server farms (currently we have two.) You should see an immediate improvement this week and a return to the stellar level of service we enjoyed earlier in the year very soon.
We have had a very open communications policy compared to some other companies I've had experience with, in fact I've often been too candid for my management's comfort level. The "wall of denial" Steve seems to be referring to here are the reports of independant users who were not having problems themselves. We *will* deny Steve's assertion that we have been less than candid in dealing with problems. We have made a point to communicate information in this forum when we had new, relevant or helpful information to present. Steve's implication that we are "finally" communicating such matters to our users is not entirely correct.
--
Gibbons
I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant. [H.L. Mencken] |
