Tuesday, February 15, 2011

New Publishing Guidelines

Many of you have contacted us about performance problems with the CMS.  We're painfully aware of this issue.  While performance has been a slowly growing concern for some time, we seem to have passed some threshold and are now seeing serious problems on a regular basis.  We're working on a variety of engineering solutions, some developed locally and others in conjunction with the vendor.  We realize that the service has become a critical tool for the community (with roughly 600 users and over 250 sites), and are treating this problem with the priority it deserves. While we work on the problem, our investigations to date have turned up one thing you can do to help:

Please avoid publishing during business hours. 

We can't emphasize this point strongly enough.  If you must publish, please be selective in the folders/files that you publish.  Publishing an entire folder for a change to a single page is inefficient and hurts system performance.  When the system is only being used for editing, it remains usable (albeit sometimes slow); it is the publishing of sites that pushes the load from sluggish to glacial.  

We'll update you as we make progress on this issue.  Questions and comments welcome.  

Thanks for your cooperation and patience.