Well, it was bound to happen. No matter how much development you do in the sandbox, any application is sure to crash and burn as soon as you put it in the hands of the actual users.

Yesterday the chat room got fully loaded up for the first time and it didn't do so well. Aside from minor glitches like displaying messages more than once, the chat room generated such a heavy load it almost crashed my server.

That's the bad news. The good news is that I spent several hours on the chat room since yesterday evening, and I've managed to fix thirteen different problems so far. There are more problems to fix (notably, the message duplication bug is still present) but these fixes should dramatically improve performance on the server.

You might ask why I've been focusing on performance first instead of in-your-face annoyances like message dupes. It's a fair question. The server performance is of critical importance, because if the server cpu is overloaded it can't do more important tasks like serve up Malex Minute episodes for you guys or SermonMP3s for my clients.

The server is not for chatting, it's for the things listed above, among other things.

All that said, please continue using the chat room the way you would normally, so i can keep a close eye on the performance and fix any other problems that arise. (Also, once the performance problems stabilize, I will be fixing the message dupe bug. It really is annoying.)

ttyl

--Alex