Hello, Winners!

Approximately 11:17am Pacific time, the Windlyn database corrupted. There's good news and bad news:

- The good news is it's been repaired and optimized, so calls and retrievals should be a little faster.

- The bad news is during diagnostic testing members may have been able to post. Unfortunately those posts may be missing. Once we determined what the problem was, we shifted to recovery mode which prevents new posting and allows us to work on things. So if you posted during those 30-40 minutes before the mode change, we apologize of losing your posts.

What happened, what do we do about it, and what does it mean for the future?

In the simplest terms, Diana has been creating/uploading so many items, the database that stores all of them has become ginormous. (That means lots of high resolution things for you guys!) To give you an idea, the Windlyn database is 5 times larger than all of the other databases combined on this server. The problem is when things get too big, they slow down and have a greater chance of corruption and tasks such as backups and repairs are more involved.

I'll have a discussion with Diana about optimizing strategies that should serve (pardon the pun!) Windlyn well into the future. This place has grown so fast and while it's really fun to watch, it caught us by surprise. I see we're close to the 50k post level. How exciting!!