Databases are tough. Unless you want to spend a million dollars on Oracle you are stuck with sporadic performance, testy optimization and occasional baffling behavior over a product you didn't build and can't control.
But without databases, it is hard to run. If you look in our footer avatar bar there are always a few hundred people reading and then contributors online writing or chatting. Even that takes a dedicated server that sometimes wheezes under the load.
Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook have all faced much worse in the last few weeks. They are big, general-purpose sites to basically let people knowing what you are doing right now - because where you drink coffee is that important to your friends.
Twice in two days, Foursquare checked into its unhappy place. The increasingly popular location-based site, which allows users to broadcast their social and business outings to friends, spent about 11 hours out of action Monday, then swooned again for several more hours Tuesday.
Yikes. Now, we got hit recently and were down for a few hours but we don't have 30 or 500 people and that wasn't an outage on our part (it was Saturday, the dead zone for the Internet) it was a hacker sending a message - maybe they didn't like me making fun of Lady Gaga or something. I assume these other sites with well-heeled financing worry less about that and more about how to keep a database running. There are no easy answers so I am inclined to give them a break.
After all, it's not like anyone really needs to know right away what I thought of "The League" this week (but it was awesome - if actual fantasy football leagues were that much fun, I'd be in one).
