Well, Viewzi made the news tonight… the 10:00 CBS local evening news to be exact. My part even made the cut. It was about 45 seconds on the 7:30 sister-station news (channel 21), and then a full 2 minutes (with two “coming up” teasers!) on the 10:00 on the Dallas CBS affiliate, channel 11. It repeated at 12:30. Very cool.

And we got hammered.

Within 15 minutes of the story on the 10:00, we had received several hundred new user accounts, and the queue manager for the screen capture subsystem was smoking. Almost literally. It never crashed, but it bogged down quite a bit and is still working out from under the deluge.

I’m in the middle of rewriting the queue manager (the part of the code that delegates screen capture tasks to the many servers we have capturing website images), but I haven’t finished it yet and rolled it into production. So, we’re still running on the old code, which is having a hard time keeping up. I think the architectural changes I’ve made to the system will allow it to scale much more gracefully, but right now it’s kinda falling on it’s face.

The rest of the system has held up beautifully, though. For a little while there we were executing almost 35,000 SQL queries a minute, and the database server hardly broke a sweat. The rest of the architecture is sound. But screen capturing is a nasty business. Once we roll out the new code, we should be able to literally have hundreds of screen capture servers running to keep up with the load.

The feedback has been very good, overwhelmingly positive, and we’re still seeing new users sign up at a faster clip than we have since we went on the air about 5 weeks ago. It’s pretty exciting, and crazy at the same time. I just hope I have a little more time to work the kinks out before we hit the national news.