Recently we have experienced some instances of slowness on specific Radiotown servers affecting your ability to use the Drupal admin site – issues have varied from general slowness to login issues. In investigating possible causes, we have identified and made changes to the QuickPost feature as it was overtaxing our systems.
Effective immediately, we are caching QuickPosts. It may take up to 5 minutes for new Quickposts to appear on your sites. Quickposts will now update on the 0’s and 5’s in every hour. That means if you make a new post at 12:03pm, it will not show till 12:05pm when the cache clears. ( For additional details on why this change was needed, see the end of this email.) As a reminder, Quickpost do NOT automatically refresh on any page, so if a listener is on your home page for 10 minutes and during that time you make an Quickpost update, they will not see it until either they navigate to another page or refresh the current page.
We continue to recommend that you do NOT use the QuickPosts for contesting. Even before Quickposts were cached, they were not an effective tool for contesting because new posts did not appear until a user visited another page or refreshed the current one.
Please know that we are investigating the possibility of having the Quickpost cache clear for individual sites upon a new Quickpost being added. This would mean that any new post you add would show up immediately on new page calls. As we know more, we’ll keep you updated on this possibility.
If there are any questions or feedback, please let me know. And thanks for your patience as we continue to improve our tools and look for ways to better serve you.
Have a great evening,
Amy
Additional details for the geek in you:
We are seeing increased activity from our stations hitting the database causing spikes that are essentially the result of the slowness experience by some stations. Digital has identified that Quickposts are accounting for over 20% of the database calls being made – to address this we have enabled caching for the Quickposts. Because every page has the QuickPost on it, it makes a call to the database each and every time a page is called. When our activity increases (which is does during certain parts of the day) this is putting a strain on our systems. Enabling caching will greatly help. As an example, prior to caching, the quickpst.php script was running an average of over 12,000 times in 60 minutes. After enabling caching, it is now running less than 1000 times during a 60 minute window.
Amy Van Hook
Entercom Digital
Director of Digital Operations
P: 503-535-0265
Howdy folks,