Community Feature Deactivated for Bug-hunting Purposes

This morning's launch of the new PokerStrategy.com community tool was overshadowed by performance related issues which we were unable to fix during the course of the day. We have therefore decided to deactivate the tool until we have been able to fix the problems.

Unfortunately the release of our PokerStrategy.com Community Beta was accompanied by severe technical complications. As the term "Beta" had indicated, we were expecting there to be a odd few problems, yet several unforeseen complications proved detrimental for the site as a whole.

Even though we ran extensive performance tests prior to the launch, the extremely large amount of users, interacting in complex ways resulted in several unforeseen problems.

We have therefore decided, after spending the entire day locating and fixing errors, to deactivate the community feature for the time being. This will once again allow you to use the rest of the site without the problems caused by the server strain.

Tomorrow will be a day of bug-hunting and we don't expect to be able to re-release the new features during the course of the day. We hope that you liked what you saw, at least during the short time in which there were no performance related problems.

Feedback is of course still desired! We are sorry that the first experience with the new community did not go as planned, and hope for your understanding.

Tell us about your suggestions for improvements

For those interested in the details, here a statement from our head of IT, Tom:

What happened exactly?

After the activation of the social network component, we immediately encountered our first performance problems. Since these had not been found in the obviously inadequate pre-launch performance tests, we decided to keep the component online to find and analyze problems in a running system.

After the main PokerStrategy page started being negatively influenced in the early afternoon, we were confronted with the difficult decision of either deactivating the new component or trying to fix the problems while live.

In the meantime, we had already found several of the problems and fixed these, so that for phases, the negative impact on other system parts was minimized.

Sadly, the problems carried on and we were ultimately forced to take the new module offline, since it was negatively influencing the performance of the remaining site.

What happens next?

In the following days we will conduct a detailed analysis of the performance data and log files. The data, won today, will then be used to create new, more encompassing performance tests which will allow us to better prepare the community feature for the next release.