You've probably noticed the slowness on our server over the last week or so. It turns out we've been doing a ton of Player Forecast Manager business this year–we're at about 250% of the usage that we've had in any previous year–and the system just isn't scaling well. We've made a couple of changes tonight and we're hoping that'll keep things rolling until we get past everyone's late fantasy drafts and the usage tails off.
We've been running on our current dedicated machine for a few years now, and it's served us pretty well most of that time, but it's plainly time for a change. We're in the planning stages of moving the works to a more flexible multi-server environment that will allow us to quickly deploy additional resources to respond to increased load. We're also looking forward to "jailing" processor- and database-intensive applications like PFM on their own servers, where they won't impact the performance of the rest of the site.
Unfortunately, we can't yet flip the switch on that, and without taking PFM offline entirely we haven't found a good solution to this issue. We're continuing to work on it, and I apologize for the delays you've experienced recently and will probably experience over the next few days.
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Presumably sunday would be the busiest fantasy draft day of the year so you guys should be fine from here on in. Thanks again BP for getting me through another draft season!
Looking forward to another successful fantasy season courtesy of BP and the PFM!
We served about 25% as many PFM sessions as articles this month, and our article traffic wasn't low. That's never happened before. We're going to be better prepared for something like that next year. Sorry again for the delays.
I usually download the PFM into excel and use my own calculations anyways, but I'd love to see the excel application again (and it would help save the server load!).