We have been encountering serious performance problems with GandiBlog over the past few days, and you have unfortunately felt the full consequences of this. Please accept our sincere apologies.

What is happening

Since the opening of GandiBlog two years ago, many of you have created one or more blogs. At the beginning, everything went well as there was not too much data. Then, with time, comments started to be added to your blogs (this is not a bad thing, but it is at the origin of the problem as you will soon see). It turns out that around 90% of these comments are spam. We began to be aware of the problem last summer and performed several "cleaning operations" to remove spam from the blog comments. We believed that everything was going well, all the more so as we put into place a high-performance cache system. Wrong!

During the deletion of the spam, we did not take into account the comments that were published, but only the ones that were flagged as spam. Last night, a first wave of deletions removed 600,000 (yes, that is correct) published trackbacks.

The space occupied by the illegitimate spam led to serious performance problems for the database and therefore hurt the entire GandiBlog platform.

What we are going to do

Purge the spam

Yesterday, we therefore deleted 600,000 illegitimate trackbacks. We are continuing with this today, as there are easily 300,000 which have no business being on GandiBlog. Note, however, that we will not touch your comments in any case, this only concerns the trackbacks.

Optimization of our database

Several points remain yet to be addressed in order to improve the performance of the database. We are going to work on this in the coming days and weeks.

Display of recent comments on your blog

The widget, which allows you to display the latest comments published on your blog, now has a cache of 30 minutes. This was implemented this morning and will remain effective.

Improvement of the cache

Several significant improvements to the cache system remain to be implemented. These will be put into production this afternoon.

Closing of comments and trackbacks

We have observed that too many blogs have been abandoned with the comments left open. No comments will be published now for a blog that has not been updated for at least 2 months. It will be possible, of course, to reactivate the acceptance of comments via the administration interface of the blog.

We're working on it !

All of this will be done as soon as possible. We are even more upset than you are about the blogs not operating at an optimal level, and we would like to be able to continue to offer you new options. This will be the case, once the blogs are running, are rapid, and in a way that is stable.

If you would like to comment on this topic, please feel free to visit the Gandi Bar