NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover

At 10:31 a.m. this morning, we received two questions from a NewsOK visitor. Here’s the first part:

do you realize your website is completely unusable today?

Yes – we realized that we were suffering from site performance problems for a significant part of the morning today. It was bad timing, since we were prepared for a massive traffic surge after the Sooners’ loss to Florida last night in the BCS National Championship game.

After a lot of research from our programming, development and server administration teams, we found the culprit … the massive amount of traffic on our main article, coupled with the massive amount of comments made on that article, led to unforeseen overload on our database servers.

Basically, the volume of traffic caused some of our users to experience issues trying to load our Web site. The “nuance” has been adjusted. And the extremely occasional unforeseen problem is a byproduct of being the largest Web site in Oklahoma that is growing at a remarkable rate.

(And when I write “occasional unforeseen problem,” I mean it. Our site-disruption rate would rank well with any site in the world.)