First of all, our first mixtape contest went off great. Some of the entries were pretty incredible. Congratulations to our winners:

1st - Alice
2nd - claireillinoise
3rd - galaxiepi

We'll finish tidying up after this one and get another contest started shortly.

Also, Eric and I met yesterday to discuss our 2.0 strategy. It's going to be pretty bitching, but it will be slow coming.

Additionally, some of the small downtime and general sluggishness of the site has been bugging me...so I wrote some code to analyze some of our database communication in order to isolate what is slowing us down.

The results were pretty surprising. Nearly all of the slowdown on the site (20ish sec load times, 5 min lockouts, etc) can be directly pinpointed to just a few isolated things.

First, activating a mix was causing some really inefficient code to run which completely locked everyone out of the site for upwards of 200-300 seconds. I changed a "ANY(" to an "IN(" and it seems to have fixed it. 4 mixes were activated afterwards and took no more than 15 seconds each to process!

Some other culprits are random artist/album/track. Based on the analysis, these are taking upwards of 50-60 seconds on average. I won't take their functionality out, but I'd recommend not using them for a day or two until I optimize them.

Finally, narcissism is going to be temporarily removed (don't worry, we'll still be getting data and will bring it back later)...user central takes an average of 15-20 seconds to load and the narcissism calculation takes ~80% of that.

We're going to try to nail these down and fix em so hopefully the experience can improve for all!