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- Bungie.net Overlord
Tom Achronos
Bungie.net Overlord
twitter: http://twitter.com/Achronos
"I have no words that would do justice to the atrocities you commit to the English language, as well as your continued assaults on the concepts of basic literacy and logical reasoning."
Posted by: Vinkus
Yep...awesome forums. Very professional. I'm a ASP/ASP.NET programmer by profession and if I launched a public app like this with this many bugs and no freakin' search function, I'd either be fired or stuck working nights and weekends until I got it fixed.
Okay, so I've reconsidered my post, based on your subsequent responses. There are a few things you have to realize about bungie.net. Unlike, say, xbox.com, or Amazon, or whoever, bungie.net is run by about 5 people. Of those, I am the only developer full time dedicated to it. Everybody else is either a contractor or a full time employee who has other responsibilities.
Second, we don't make any money. This is the primary reason why we're such a small team. It is hard to justify getting more help when we're not actually producing a product that people pay for (this is a free community site after all, it isn't even customer support).
Third, the perf problems are mostly addressed via our load handling plans. We peaked at 6million pageviews, and didn't crash. The bugs we are currently seeing in the forums, however, are the result of many users added very quickly and presenting a usage pattern somewhat different that our stress test. You can test all you want, but nothing compares to a million people using the system for real.
Fourth - when you have this many people using your website, you can't simply change things whenever you want. We have to be very careful when you change things, which is why it takes a while to fix things. We have to find, fix, and test, and then make sure we didn't break anything else. And we always find new stuff that was broken.
Fifth - Search. Search is easy. Good search is hard. And by good search, I'm talking about the kind that is effective enough so that people use it, AND one that performs well. Making a search that does both is hard (ask google). We're doing it right. If we just slapped a quick one up there (and we could), not only might it destroy perf, but it wouldn't fix the problem of people posting duplicates, because the search would most likely suck, and people wouldn't use it. So, we're doing it right. I'm sorry if it isn't quick enough for you, but that's not something I frankly care about - I care about getting right.
[Edited on 12/3/2004 1:43:11 PM]