70,000 markers and counting!

More than 70,000 people have signed maps in the last three months - and counting! The site is on track for more than 200,000 hits this month, and I couldn't be more excited. Statistically speaking, we should hit 10,000 hits a day in less than 30 days :-).

Thanks to everybody!

Welcome to the blog!

Glad to see you've found your way to the BuddyMapping.com development blog! This is the first post, and I'm happy to announce an end to our recent database issues. BuddyMapping has become increasingly popular over the last month or so, and we've had several database outages due to high traffic. When the site was originally designed, the stress on the database wasn't a top concern. Every time someone looked at a map with 100 people on it, the database was being accessed 10 times. The map was designed to incrementally load markers, but doing so (even with a cache) involved way too many database connections.

So the system has been changed. All of the markers are now loaded into javascript when the page loads, and then added to the map incrementally. This system was refined over the course of a few days, and is actually much faster than the original method (who would have guessed?). Loading the map page can become tedious when there are more than a thousand markers (because the size of the HTML file can approach 1MB!) and we're working on minimizing that.

So hang tight. I appologize for the outages ~ hopefully we've seen the last of them!

- Ben Gotow