In a word, me. In university I basically failed out of the Computer Science portion of my degrees because, despite flashes of ingenuity, I can’t code for shit. Everything I’ve ever written tends to melt servers under high volumes, and this happens to Kottu, basically cyclically. The problem is that Kottu has gotten huge. I don’t know how many feeds are on there, it’s definitely over 200. In one update (from scratch) Kottu pulls in over 3,000 posts. The rate slows down – that’s an update from zero – but still. I didn’t pay attention to the database for a while and when I looked there were 2 million entries in the postmeta table. Which is why the site was grinding to a halt. I just abandoned that database entirely and rebuilt Kottu from scratch somewhere else. I also bought a private server and am allocating a shitload of memory to it, so let’s see how that goes.

If anyone has any LAMP/Shell skills and would like to help optimize the code and database, please let me know.

And, I’m really sorry. I don’t pay as much attention to Kottu as I should and it’s been totally messed up for months. I didn’t really do anything about it until it totally broke and even now I’ll still have to clean the database again in about a month. So again, sorry, that the customer service sucks.

Posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 in kottu, Tech.