Tumbledown
AATW: “I wonder when this’ll get fixed.”
It’s a secret conspiracy to make Tumblr slow at specifically the times you’re using it. :)
This is more nerdy and technical than most people care about: the Tumblr database server is under a heavy load, and the daily backups run early in the morning in EST (when you make some of your posts). Dumping the entire database for the backup is disk-intensive, and because the DB load is sometimes disk-bound, this reduces responsiveness between about 5 AM and 6 AM EST.
An attempted optimization on Wednesday backfired and made it slower. I reverted it yesterday. (Tip: InnoDB is not good for tables that only have 12 bytes of data per row.)
We’ve finally reached a point at which software optimizations can’t prevent the need for more hardware. Davidville Upper Management has ordered a new, super-beefy, quad-CPU, 8 GB RAM, 4x 15k disk RAID-10 master database server. When we get it installed and deployed in about a week, you’ll see a dramatic boost in performance and responsiveness, and the 5-6 AM slowdown will no longer be noticeable.