As we mentioned in a recent post, improving the overall performance and responsiveness of WebJunction post-launch is our top priority. Right now we are seeing page load times in several areas of the site that just aren’t up to our expectations or those of our members and partners, and we are committed to making the site easy and enjoyable to both actively use or just wander through. Because “we’re working on it” absent any details can get old quickly, we want to share in more detail the steps we’re taking to improve your WebJunction experience.

The process to identify performance issues and rollout remedies has several steps which are already underway:

Step 1 (complete):
Last weekend we rolled out several improvements to the servers that host WebJunction in our datacenter in Ohio. These improvements related to how the Web and application servers were configured. We also, starting on Thursday morning, began a scheduled process to clear server memory shortly before peak user times on the site. Servers are individually scheduled, allowing users to be directed to other servers by our “load balancing” equipment.

Did it work? Yes, to a degree. Since we implemented these changes and processes, our servers have all seen noticeable improvements in response times. While our goal is to ensure that all users are able to load the  home page in under 10 seconds, a significant percentage of users are still not experiencing those numbers. A good start, but a start only.

Step 2 (underway now to implement within the next 2 weeks):
Double the overall number of application servers that run WebJunction and our partner sites on September 7th. In effect we’re adding more overall capacity and capability. Once that’s in place we’ll continue to apply diagnostic tools to portions of the site and code that we suspect may be contributing to poor performance, and learning everything we can. This sets the stage for…

Step 3 (ongoing):
Take everything we’ve learned in Step 2 and turn our developers loose to optimize the code in areas that need improvement. This process in effect will never end – as site traffic grows and we add more functionality, we’ll be constantly and relentlessly focusing on improving performance across all aspects of the user experience on WebJunction.  This is where we hope to see the most significant, long term gains in performance across the site.

While we can’t promise “X improvement in response times by Y date”, we are confident that both our short-term fixes and long-term improvements will result in a noticeably faster WebJunction. Please watch this blog for additional updates as we have them.

Your input and experience with WebJunction is critical to helping us continue to identify and resolve any issues. Please continue to share your comments with us here on the blog, via email to support@webjunction.org, or in our help & support discussions on the site.

The WebJunction Team