AO3 News

Emergency measures affecting works

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Published:
2020-03-31 19:04:15 UTC
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The Archive has seen a marked uptick in traffic during March, with weekly page views increasing from 262 million to 298 million in just two weeks. We expect this trend to continue, and in order to keep the site running, we need to take emergency measures. The quickest, most helpful change we can make is caching the works we serve to logged out users. Unfortunately, this means that starting immediately, logged out users may experience a delay in work updates, and hits from logged out users will no longer be included in works' hit counts.

Why is this happening?

The increased traffic is putting a strain on our database servers, which receive dozens of requests every time someone loads a work. (We plan to order new hardware to help with this strain, but first we need to finish some ongoing server maintenance and determine which hardware to order. Delivery and installation of servers ordinarily takes a few months, and there may be unexpected delays due to the pandemic.)

Serving cached copies of works to logged out users will drastically reduce the number of database requests we make. Caching means we don't have to ask the database for the latest information every time someone visits a certain page in a given period of time. Instead, one of our front end servers gives everyone the exact same copy of that page. After about an hour, that copy is updated.

What changes will I notice?

Starting immediately, you may notice the following changes:

  1. When a new chapter is posted, logged out users will only be able to access it by direct link until the cache updates, which will happen about once every 60 minutes. Other changes to the work (e.g., edits made by the creator or new comments or kudos that have been left) may also not be visible to logged out users until the cache is updated.
  2. Because work pages need to be identical for all logged out users, we've had to stop automatically filling in guests' names and emails on the comment form. (You can request an invitation and create an account if you'd like the form to remember you!)
  3. Logged out users will see the adult content warning on every work rated either Mature, Explicit, or Not Rated. This is temporary and will be fixed as soon as possible.
  4. New hits from logged out users will not be added to works' hit counts. (Existing hits will not be lost.) The code that increases hit counts lives on our application servers, so it will not run when the front end servers hand out cached copies of works.

(This section was updated at 00:25 UTC April 1.)

Will hit counts be fixed?

We are exploring options that will allow us to resume counting hits from logged out users, but it may take some time to find and implement a viable long term solution. We'll work as quickly as we can, but we ask for your patience -- our volunteers may need to prioritize additional performance improvements or their own wellbeing in these stressful times.

We will keep you updated on any significant progress or setbacks here on AO3 News and on our @AO3_Status Twitter feed.

Updated 11:00 UTC April 24: We have deployed new code that allowed us to resume counting hits from logged out users, along with some general changes to how hits are being measured.