Debrief on Yesterday's Performance Issues

Pretty much all day yesterday there were performance problems with the site related to rating things, and adding new things to the database.

As this site is called Rate It All, these sorts of problems are pretty devastating.

Here's what happened. When unregistered reviewers rate something, we create a "state" that remembers their review so that when they go on to register, their review can post. These folks are stored in the database as "Anons." As you know, no review can go live on RateItAll until there is a registered user behind it. We have to do it this way, or the spammers would overwhelm us.

Well, it turns out that a lot of folks abandon ship once it gets time to join RateItAll.

We hadn't cleaned out the Anons in a little while, and there were 2.7M (yes, MILLION) Anon accounts that were jamming up our database.

This is why things were sluggish yesterday, and we're still working on cleaning these accounts out. Going forward, we'll create a process so that these abandoned Anon accounts are deleted if they do not complete registration...