|
Author: M.Prince (29 Nov 06 12:16pm)
It's an issue of our database being overloaded. If you get a blank page it's actually an error on our end, and we've just hidden the error codes so it comes up blank.
There are a lot of reasons for the problem, but one of the big ones is that Google decided our PageRank should be higher and they should index us faster. That's usually great news, but in this case it has become a bit overwhelming. When Google, Yahoo, and MSN all start hammering away at the same time we have started to experience database slowdowns. That means any page that isn't cached may not show up. And any calls which have to query the database may result in a white page.
We're working on fixing it. First, we need to upgrade our infrastructure. Since we're not making any money off the service, we're trying to scrape together funds in other places in the Unspam budget to justify the purchase of some more serious machines and a big RAID array to store what has become a massive amount of data. Second, we have asked Google to slow down with the indexing for now. They were requesting 100K+ unique, uncached pages per day; we've throttled that back to what we hope is a more reasonable number.
Hopefully that will fix the issues you were experiencing with the Lookup IP feature. If not, be patient and it should be back online as soon as we figure out our hardware upgrade.
Finally... there are six or seven major cool new features we've been working on in the background. We hope to release them all sometime in January. Some are ready now, but we'd like to make sure the site is in healthy shape before we start cranking on new services. Watch these pages for more details!
|
