Faster, Better, Stronger

Most of you have probably noticed the recent slow- and downtimes we’ve experienced on the site lately. First of all: a huge and sincere Sorry to all of you from the entire team here at SoundCloud.

While putting the finishing touches to the couple of goodies we have lined up for you, we’ve clearly underestimated the growth that SoundCloud has seen in the past weeks and months. Until end of last week, we juggled between finishing the upcoming features and at the same time making sure that the site is up during peak times (usually starting around 9pm CET).

After numerous night shifts and quick fixes we figured that these fixes are not fully satisfactory. We’re going to prioritize the improvements on the performance side of things before we launch any new features to the site.

All developers are currently on different tasks to improve the general experience, but here’s a quick higher-level outline we wanted to share with you:

New database servers:

We’re waiting for the new servers to arrive and they should be with us soon. We’ll be making sure to have them installed and ready-to-go as quick as possible but in the meantime, we have several backup machines that should be fully functional in the next days.

Dashboard:

We’re planning some fixes that will hopefully make the Dashboard performance better, especially after logging in.

Database:

We will optimize the general writing & reading off the databases, especially everything related to mailboxes, comments, tracks and API calls that will make the site faster.

We promise to continue working hard and will do our best to improve the short-term performance to give you back the best experience when uploading your tracks & artwork, when seeing the waveform being created and when commenting on tracks. Also, it looks like we’ll be able to bring back the delete option on your Dashboard very very soon. We’ll update this post as soon as it happens and also post to Twitter.

Our goal clearly is to bring SoundCloud back on the fast lane and we have made it our priority to ensure that SoundCloud runs smoothly.

We’ve set up a status blog over at our friends at Tumblr where we started posting updates about the site status. Feel free to follow the blog if you’re a Tumblr user or subscribe to the RSS feed. Additionally, we will keep you posted on our Twitter account.

On that note: we’re still looking for a kick-ass system administrator whose thrill is to help us scale a rapidly growing community of music lovers. If you’re the champion we’re looking for, apply here.

Again, from everyone at the SoundCloud HQ, apologies for the lack of communication on this.

Update (04/11 – 5.23pm): The Dashboard delete buttons are back. Thanks for your patience.

Update (06/11 – 11.55am): Phew that was a hard one to crack but we discovered a misbehaving monitoring script that made an unusual amount of requests in very small intervals. Good news is that soon after resolving, we observed a significant increase and stabilization of the site performance. The new databases have arrived and mostly installed and the fixes & improvements of the last days have also helped.