Randy's Blog 

Given recent traffic surges, you may experience slow page loads, delays in updates and periodic white pages on the site today. Our engineers are working full steam to resolve these problems. We apologize for these very frustrating issues.

For those of you who have been Care2 members for years, you've seen this movie before.  The cause is that as we grow, certain systems on our site experience traffic jams. We'll then fix that bottleneck and traffic will flow smoothly for a period... until it reaches a new higher traffic level, and a different bottleneck will appear, causing another traffic jam. 

So while we've made huge improvements to our system over the years, there's always a future bottleneck lurking somewhere down the road. Unfortunately, this is a painful reality for most fast growing sites with limited engineering resources.  We do what we can to predict and remove bottlenecks we see down the road, but given the complexity of our system and the small size of our engineering team, we're not always able to stop the problems before they happen.

The good news is these slow downs are caused by more people using Care2 than ever.  We should have a solution to this current bottleneck in the next day or two... and are working on a major system upgrade over the next few months that should create even more headroom for future growth.

Bottom line, keeping the site speedy is our top priority, and things should return to normal relatively soon. We are painfully aware of how frustrating these issues are to all of you and, again, apologize for the inconvenience.

[update 1:45pm PT]

Just as I was posting the above, our engineering team decided it was best to take the live site offline so that the databases could catch up... which meant that for the past several hours no updates were being pushed to the site (including my post above).

So, not only were things looking odd, but we couldn't even let you all know what was going on... not good.  Fun day.

Just about everything should now be catching up, though you will likely experience a few areas of latency perhaps some other oddness around the site for the remainder of the day.  No data has been lost, so any updates you made during our earlier problems will be saved.

Site performance will be our prime focus until we believe the situation is entirely back to the high quality level you expect and deserve.

Again, my apologies for all of this.  We will make this right.