Update on TypePad Performance

In our previous post, Ben pointed out some of the issues that led to TypePad's poor performance in October. As he mentioned, a large portion of the Six Apart staff was working day and night to solve those issues and deliver our customers the performance they're paying for. Barak's post detailed a number of the specific tactics we were taking.

And so, over the past week, we've made a very significant number of changes: we've upgraded database hardware; we've optimized the application in a number of different places, including stats, publishing, and general database access; we've upgraded our network; we've added more application hardware; etc.

And over the past three days, we—and a lot of you—have noticed the improvements. We feel confident enough to say (and, being superstitious, knocking on wood every time we say it) that we've made a huge amount of progress in the performance of both the application and the
published blogs. TypePad's performance is better than it's been in months—in fact, it's quite a bit better than it was even in the months prior to October.

We're not sitting back and resting, though. We have a number of performance enhancements and upgrades still planned, as well as finishing the last few steps of our data center move. Some of the new hardware we'll be adding may require some scheduled maintenance, but we'll be sure to give you advance notice. Being pessimistic in general—or, at least, acknowledging the number of unexpected issues we've had in the past couple of weeks—we're also wary about declaring victory too early, so we're not promising to be out of the proverbial woods yet.

But we're very happy with the progress we've made so far. Thanks to everyone who has written in appreciation of the improved performance, and thanks to all of you for your patience.