brickhawk.com perfomance update

Hello Patrons :)

Just a quick update on brickhawk.com's performance - which you may have noticed has been a little slow lately - and what's happening to sort it out!

Firstly though, you can rest assured that Hawk alerts are still being sent out the moment a price/offer/availability/etc change is detected, and they are not being impacted by the slowness you are seeing on brickhawk.com. And the "Take me straight to the deal!" button in the alert emails means you still have the best chance to snag the set you want, for the price you need.

For brickhawk.com though, it's struggling under the weight of millions (yes millions!) of price chances and lots (and lots!) of LEGO fans who want to look at all of these price changes.

So to try and get things working faster, here's the first part of the plan:

• New servers were purchased last week, and are being commissioned now. They will be used to aid the separation of different components of BrickHawk, and also allow for some single instances of these components to be scaled up to multiple instances. This should stop your requests from having to wait for the servers to be ready, so you can get a quicker response
• BrickHawk's database is being re-structured so it can perform better (read: go faster!). Heaps of work has been done on this, and whilst it's not quite yet ready to be released, here's a look at just how much quicker things are going to be. Below are some screenshots - the first showing how long it's currently taking to load prices for a retailer, and the second how long it's taking for the same thing but with the planned changes (see the "30 rows in set (<time it took to fetch them>)" at the bottom of each screenshot:

Current performance - 5.2 seconds :( 

During testing - done in just 0.09 seconds :)

And when this is all complete, further work will continue to improve and optimise everything else so that you get the best experience at brickhawk.com. Also the things you've been requesting to see on brickhawk.com will also continue to be released :)

Over the next few days, you may notice a few little hiccups on brickhawk.com as the changes are rolled out. After that you should see brickhawk.com working much quicker. Fingers crossed!

If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to comment below.

Thank you again for your support - it is truly appreciated. Your comments, feedback, suggestions and ideas are awesome and highly valued too. You really are the best :)

BH.