by Rick Belcher

If  you have had problems viewing this website over the last 24-hours you aren’t alone.  An immense amount of work has gone into diagnosing the outages and finding a proper, long-term solution. Not to bore you with arcane details, but it took a developer many hours, starting Sunday evening and continuing until around 4 pm today, collaborating with others to get the site back on track.  Along the way there were multiple extended chats and phone conversations with the hosting service and others as the hiccups continued. 

What caused the outages?  A huge number of people signing on to the website simultaneously.  Or it could also be called the Raft-O-Rama surge.  There was enormous interest in seeing the video, the decorated rafts, the winners, and the story that made it such a special day at Clark Lake.   The response broke previous expectations. 

The solution? The resources of this website have been doubled, so high volume usage should never be a problem again.  In retrospect the solution seems obvious.  But the diagnostics failed to uncover that until all other possibilities were eliminated. 

So, what else can be said?  Thanks, Clark Lake for supporting this website, Raft-O-Rama and the Clark Lake Spirit!

 

Tonight’s sunset at about 9:05 pm (Monday, August 6)