A Few Good Databases…

by Glenn Kelman | 3 Comments

Redfin.com’s performance and stability problems, which began with Thursday morning’s upgrade and continued until this evening, seem to be over.  All the photos and details of recently sold homes that became available with this upgrade had caused our database to fail under high user load . We resolved the problem by tuning the database and deploying additional databases, and now the website is once again fast and seems stable.

Redfin’s site is still sending out overdue listing alerts and tardily loading photos of listings but we hope that all those jobs run their course by Saturday morning. Until then, and probably for days to come, we will be carefully monitoring the whole Redfin system.

Next week, we may discuss here on this blog what went wrong and how we’re going to try to avoid the same problems in the future. For now, many thanks to all the engineers who worked ’round the clock since early Thursday to get us back online, and especially to the customers who patiently waited for that to happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you tried to check out the new Redfin yesterday without much success, please give it another shot now.

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Discussion

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  • http://www.diversesolutions.com Andrew Mattie

    Hey Glenn,

    I know that you guys have some brilliant engineers over there, and so I’m suspect you’ve already considered this, but you may want to check into a cloud storage system like Amazon’s S3 for your photo woes. We (Diverse Solution) switched our entire MLS photo storage system to them back in April in order to get better reliability and leverage their cheaper infrastructure costs and we haven’t looked back since.

    We easily upload 40M+ photos to S3 every month between all the different photo sizes we upload and all the different MLS’s we handle and Amazon handles it like a champ. We link to the photos directly on their platform so that our own servers never have to handle any of the requests or traffic. If it’s good enough for companies like Amazon, Twitter, and Smugmug, it’s good enough for us. It’s way cheaper too.

    Andrew Mattie

  • http://blog.redfin.com/blog/author/glenn%20kelman Glenn Kelman

    Great idea Andrew. And we’ve considered it before.
    In this, it wasn’t the photos that gave us problems, but it’s a good suggestion all the same. Thanks for the suggestion!