Rhapsody.com comes out of beta

Small note of personal pride and pride in my team at work: www.rhapsody.com has stripped off its "Beta" branding with a fresh new design and cool new AJAXy features including an improved web player and better personalization.

We launched last night, which was unusually stressful.  Our load test numbers weren’t glowingly positive.  And if the servers couldn’t handle the load, things could get really bad.  Normally, we’d just roll back to a previous version of the code, but because of marketing requirements around a new product launch, we couldn’t do that.  So last night after we launched and the servers were totally pegged at middle-of-the-night super-low traffic levels, I thought we were in the middle of my complete nightmare scenario of "coding our way out of the problem."  Nobody sleeps until we figure out what’s wrong and get it fixed and stable.  I’ll spare the details, but it turned out to be just a background house-cleaning process hogging the disk and today at peak traffic we’re actually doing just fine.  Actually I think the site is pretty snappy.

Take home messages:

  • More, better, earlier load testing.  Profiling even.
  • Get the site up early enough that you can roll back if you need to, even if it means a bunch of throw-away creative/design work.

Anyway, I’m really happy to have last night behind me.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 1:52 PM and is filed under Ego, Music, Software Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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