A series of nightmares ...

Yeap, it is launched. Launched and having a blast of problems. For the past 2-3 weeks, I am like a robot, troubleshooting problems with the website, working on 24-48 hours shift without sleep.

I have 3 weeks of nightmares after the launch. The website cannot cope with the load, performance became an issue. After investigation, it turn out that cache settings were not configure properly and there are too much visuals to be displayed, resulting every request hitting my web servers and databases. This cause the whole website to slow down to a crawl.

After figuring out the problem and arguing with the vendor on the quality, we need to run performance tests to ensure that all is well. These tests has to be done in the middle of the night, so I can't sleep at night, and I had to work in the day.

I need to comment on something too. Surfers are really busybodies. They want to check out everything that is new. When the announcement was made, there were a hugh jump in the number of people coming to the site. We thought only the punters will be interested, it turn out every tom, dick and harry is coming in. Now with the ease of mobile connecting to the Internet, everybody start using the mobiles to access our website.

Finally, most of the performance issues were rectified. Now is to optimise the codes and ensure that they don't take up too much server resources and allow the rendering of web pages to be faster.

After the ordeal, I came to a conclusion. Never compromise performance with users' requirements. They want everything to be display yet they cannot understand that for all visuals, esp those high definition ones, comes with a price on performance. When the website came to a crawl, then they accept the fact there are too much visuals and trimmed down on these.

Another thing ... I am not young any more. My body cannot cope with the tiredness. I have to admit I am tired ... dead tired.

It's launched ... finally

Yeap ... the new revamp website is up and running.  Teething problems here and there, but still it is officially launched.

My company's website new look

Yeah ... ^_^