List of interesting people down... any news?

When can we espect the list of interesting people to be up again?

Since 24 hours I get the message that it is temporarly down due to

server load.

 

To me, this is a quite precious tool to keep abreast of the production

of those individuals whose work I like the most, and I sincerely hope

it will be restored.

Interesting people is down because it is quite expensive to compute. Normally, this isn't a problem, because it isn't requested frequently -- at least not relative to the total number of requests. However, in the last few days, some idiot has been running a robot that does a large number of Interesting People searches per minute. Either this is someone with an off-line reader that is out of control or else a deliberate Denial of Service attack. Either way, when it happens it slows down the whole site considerably.

Thanks Brian for explaining the situation. I also rely heavily on my list of interesting people, especially after a length of absence and trying to catch up with others. Hopefully this feature will be back on soon. BTW, what's one's motive in setting up robot to go through this list at such high rate, if it's not a pure sabotage?

I echo the others! for me as well it is an importent tool. I hope it will come back soon.

Brian,

 

This is an important feature of the site. Any ideas on how to correct the problem? PRETTY PLEASE...

That may explain why the site has occasionally been so slow the past few days. Even on DSL it's been painfully slow at times.

I might guess that the heavy load comes from having to look up the recent updates of all of the listed people.

 

As a temporary solution, could we at least get the list of people WITHOUT the most recent uploads, as an additional link in our workspace? Just think of it as a directory...

 

I know you migh object that one could do this himself with bookmarks, but one of the great feature of photo.net is that does not need tons of bookmarks to be navigated, and it can be nicely perused from anywhere one happens to be.

Salvatore's idea seems like a good one -- I guess people will scream and shout about *any* change to the site, but I wonder how many people really care about knowing when their interesting people list last contributed anything to the site vs. how many people are just using it as a location-indedpendent bookmark manager...

I would like to add my support for simplifying the interesting people to a directory if it would help with site load. I would also love to be able to record my favorite images independently of favorite photogs - kind of a direct photo bookmark. I spend time on the DPChallenge site as well, and have found that functionality to be very valuable to me.

I would have no problem at all if this was only run once every 1, 2 or 4 weeks. There would

then only be a server load at very predictable times, convenient to thesite.

 

Certainly not something that needs recomputed 24/7.

Louis

Thank you so much. It's now back up!