Soocial blog

… but only after we’ve got some initial scalability issues solved. We thought it would be good to give all of those waiting to be able to use Soocial an update on where we stand on getting more people into Soocial. As many commented after we got Techcrunched last week, we need to be able to handle a substantial amount of increased traffic. We are currently working hard on doing exactly that.

The current situation is that we have 4392 people in line for an invite (as of Sunday night 23:21 CET), we’ll be doing our best to send out the first batch of invites this Wednesday. Hopefully by the end of the week can have an extra 2000 users in Soocial.

We’ve been focussing on getting our product working right, without much attention on scalability, although we knew it would have to come sooner or later. We didn’t think it would hit us this fast.

We are currently splitting our webapp, database, and our sync bots to work on separate servers and using Amazon EC2 to handle the overload from the initial sync bots surge. (The initial sync with Highrise and GMail takes a lot longer the first time, as we create backups and crazy merging of all the contact in Soocial and Gmail/Highrise.)

We’ll also be optimizing some of our code to better handle the load, for example some of the sync bot code is pretty dumb. I’m sure we’ll run into much more possible optimization, but we want to find a balance between optimizing, debugging and creating new features.

If you feel you can help us out we have a few jobs open
so send us your OPML along with your cv and vcf to stefan (at) soocial (dot) com.

UPDATE: The jobs are currently being worked off at a mad rate, but it might take some time before the changes from Highrise and GMail are digested and propagated. Also changes being pushed to GMail and Highrise will take some time, we are working to get these syncs much faster.