From Moliere to Manet to Dumas, there’s never been a shortage of inspiration among French artists. It’s as though there’s something in the air that naturally ignites creative fireworks. As we’re about to discover during our first-ever Exclusives only iStockalypse, just walking the streets of Marseilles is an exercise in inspiration.

The challenge? Site traffic keeps growing at higher and higher levels. How much higher? An extra 1.5 million visits over the last 30 days, as compared to the 30 days prior to that. That works out to an extra 16 million page views. We’re serving over 2x what we did last year. Although we’ve made lots of progress, with such rapid growth there is more to be done.

We did foresee these increases, and took steps to accommodate them. In July and August we quadrupled our server capacity. However, some parts of the site cannot be scaled by adding more servers - they need to be centralized on a single server. This is the master server that has been talked about so much in the forums of late. We underestimated the effects of the increased traffic would have on the master - and did not anticipate the locking issues. The databases are still getting overloaded from time to time. Our internal experts and consultants are testing some operating system changes that we hope will help in the short term. They will continue working on it throughout the weekend.

We are also working on a long term plan to re-architect the system so we won’t rely on a single master server like we do now. We are looking at new technologies and new techniques. It will involve a lot of work, both in our code and in the way we store the data. But in the end, we will end up with a system that will be much larger in scale and scope, taking us to a whole new level.

We also have some new hardware en route to do some testing, but this will take time.

What this means
We may need to restart our main servers on occasion. This means no site for about 14 (agonizing) minutes if all goes well. Please understand that we realize this is unacceptable, and we’re doing everything in our power to keep it from happening. When it does, we ask you to be patient. If you phone into customer service, please be gentle. They are fielding hundreds of calls, and can’t tell you much more than our ETA to be back up.

To our customers
Again, we thank you for your patience. We will try to keep you updated, but please understand our time is best spent working on the issues. When things are ironed out, and we’re back to running normally, we can explain and expand further.

We appreciate your support. Though we know you are still experiencing painful moments, all of this is moving us toward an amazingly strong new iStock infrastructure. Please stick with us. You won’t be disappointed.

To our artists
We know you are worried about potential loss of royalties. Please do not be: we are selling far more images than we ever have before, even with the site issues.

For those worried about missed transactions. It is possible that a fraction of a percentage of orders are not properly processed when the site starts acting up. We’re investigating, and if we find it to be an issue, we will do a full audit to make it right. Rest assured you’ll be properly paid for images sold.

Again, we appreciate everyone’s understanding.

Comments/Questions:

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=58279&page=1

http://istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=352

Shooting kids can take a lot of time and energy. Unless you know the beast you are dealing with, they can overtake you and render you frustrated and sour. As the veteran of many photosessions with children, and have developed plenty of ideas to help you get the most from your shoot.

The problems we fixed last week had to do with throughput. When those bottlenecks were fixed, it increased the load on the servers by a truly significant amount (average load was higher than our highest peaks–ever). Which is fine. That much more traffic means lots more sales.

Unfortunately we hit a snag along the way. We ran up against a known bug in mySQL 5 (which is what the site runs on). We simply can’t process any more transactions per second. Yeah, it’s a good problem to have. There is a fix in the next version of mySQL, but it’s in beta and a long way from being production-ready (and no, adding more machines doesn’t help in this case).

So our developers have been coding around the problem. It’s slow and meticulous work. Kinda like changing the fan belt on a car doing 60 on the freeway.

We turned off stats because they were hitting the servers especially hard, and aggravating the bug. We’re running the script to update your graphs every afternoon. It takes about 3 hours to run, but in the mean time, your number of downloads and cash balance is always up to date. There is code in place that should allow us to turn it back on–we’ll know if it’s ready to go by late Monday.

Hope that clears things up a bit. Thanks for hanging in there.

Click on the ‘Show Beta’ link on the far right in the search bar and take it out for a spin.  If at any time you would like to go back to the original search, just click on the ‘Hide Beta’ link.

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

iStock’s favorite forum personality Peebert takes Alex in this half hour interview, talking about Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show, and crappy movie user interfaces.