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The State of WinCustomize Address

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The State of WinCustomize Address

Well, we really are not a state but we want to start legistlation to become one!

from WinCustomize Forums

As you all know WinCustomize has had more than its share of problems for the last year and especially the last few months.  Unfortunately we have not been able to give WinCustomize the attention that it deserves.  Two main reasons for this is because we are under staffed in our IT department and for the last several months our primary attention has been turned towards supporting the release of Galactic Civilizations II.

For many months are staff consisted of only 3 people to run WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, TotalGaming.net, GalCiv1.com, PoliticalMachine.com, store.stardock.com, JoeUser.com, DesktopGadgets.com, SocietyGame.com, PowerUser.tv, XPThemes.com, our entire Database structure, Stardock Central Servers, all our Interal Database and Intranet needs, and of course now GalCiv2.com and its supporting sites.  But in January we hired another developer (Dean) to help lighten the load.  And starting next week we will have a new developer on board and by the years end we hope to hire a couple more developers.  So we are expanding our staff and we really hope to get everything fixed up properly this year.  So if you know of anyone who is interested in doing ASP.Net Web Development of if you are interested in it yourself and live in Michigan please send me a resume at [email protected]

While most of us were off working on GalCiv2.com, Dean has been slowly chomping away at converting WinCustomize from ASP.Net 1.14 to ASP.Net 2.0.  Yesterday we launched the new version of WinCustomize.  There really is not any new features with this new build of WinCustomize but there have been several tweaks to the code to improve performance and hopefully stability.  Some people are already reporting speed improvements so that is a good thing.  But always with updates there are always some bumps along the road as others are reporting logon issues. 

Many of the logon issues were occuring during our upgrade process because of an incompatability between cookies written under the different versions of ASP.Net.  If you are currently experiencing any logon/logoff issues please use this link ( https://www.wincustomize.com/killcookies.aspx ) to delete your WinCustomize cookies.  After that logon/relogon and if you still experience problems please report them here.

So over the course of the next couple of weeks we will be focusing on improving the stability and speed of WinCustomize.  So if you have any bugs or problems (no feature requests please) please report them here and we will do our best to get them fixed as soon as possible.

Also, we are adding additional servers to our server farm so we can load balance all of our sites better.  Not just WinCustomize but all our websites.  This should also help with speed and stability as well.

In a nutshell, thats where we are at and that is our plan.  We do apologize for all the site problems you have been enduring and we hope to turn things around.  And if we don't you have my permission to flog Dean (sorry Dean but my skin is a little sensitive and I don't want any bruises ;)  ) ..

4,889 views 117 replies
Reply #76 from WinCustomize Forums Top
note: "Edit" worked on Jafo's screenshot page!
Reply #77 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Still can't edit the forums. I started getting my skin updates, but still no forum updates.
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #78 from WinCustomize Forums Top
After all the speed of the last few weeks the site was sluggish yesterday. Today it has been back to its pre-update speed, minutes to load a thread, or not at all... What happened?
Reply #79 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Fuzzy...there was a site update...and they seem to take time to propagate....

Here [and now] it's positively zooming along....

Reply #80 from WinCustomize Forums Top
That last comment took about 2 seconds to post/update/reload...
Reply #81 from WinCustomize Forums Top

It's very fast now.  Although I still cannot post images or html.

Reply #82 from WinCustomize Forums Top
At times today the site is as slow as it's ever been. Clicking on threads etc. brings zero response.
Reply #83 from WinCustomize Forums Top
[14:45 Mountain Time] I just got an email update notification! It's working again!! Way to go, WC!
Reply #84 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Got back edits, and skin and forum notifications...but now I can't access 'My Skins'. I keep getting 'Service Unavailable".
Reply #85 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Yup..still no real changes here either. Clicking on forum topics just gets frustrating...Service Unavailable...Timeouts...or just nothing.
Reply #86 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Just typed a comment, on a forum, ArtRageous contest...
...hit 'Submit...
fast results, but took me to "You are not allowed:(..." page
and signed me out in the process.
Hit 'Back', was still signed in, but comment had gone to comment heaven

[aren't we lucky to live in the 'online age'? ]
Thanks for the progress so far, WC
Reply #87 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Nice 'n' fast this eve. Runs along, does all the stuff. Nice work!
Reply #88 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Very slow tonight. 

Reply #89 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Normal speed seems fairly quick now ... logon problem seems to be fixed.
WC does seem to be going to sleep periodically. By 'going to sleep' I mean I will be cruising right along reading this, looking at that, and BAM, no response for about 5 minutes or so. Sometimes I get the timeout error page, sometimes the page I clicked on loads after a lengthy delay. After a bit, it's back to quick and fast only to nod off again.

Very annoying!
Reply #90 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Mostly fast for me. Occasional lags searching the forums. I seem to have more problems with lags when using Firefox. If I switch to IE or MSN Explorer the lags usually go away or don't seem to be as long. Tonight I got the log out problem when switching forum sections twice. Haven't seen that for a few weeks. I used Ccleaner tonight and have it set to not delete WC cookies. I had the gallery on the main page reduced with the new wrench gadget but it reverted to default on IE and MSN Explorer but not on Firefox, weird.
Reply #91 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Last night had to attempt download of OD+ four times before finally getting the whole thing without "an unexpected server error." but I did finally make it. Maybe some "pseudo-official" participants can be an extension for the stardock staff. That would keep the other 498,000 of us from saying "me too." I would like to provide good feedback, but don't want to add to the noise. Having been on the other side of the wire most of my career, I can appreciate the kind of headaches you guys are having at this point. Thanks for the good work. Let us know how we can best help.

Here is an interesting link for state of the network by region... Internet Traffic Report




Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Reply #92 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Still mostly slow for me...yesterday I kept getting "an error ocurred" and no pages would load...then they would....then they wouldn't. It would be nice to get some answers as to whats happening...will it be fixed or not...rather than "we're getting yet another server upgrade" and still nothing changes. Its getting really annoying being kept in the dark about this.
Reply #93 from WinCustomize Forums Top
[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpWorkerRequest wr, Boolean silent) +395

#91: What he said The loading times get me to wander in my mind, I started thinking about all the servers, network hand-shakes, passing-on of my keyboard commands, bits, bytes, flip-flops, stack requests...
...I'm lucky the whole thing ever works at all
Reply #94 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Capn
Thanks for the great link!
ms response time, packet-loss... wild!
makes you wonder...in a demographic sorta way
Reply #95 from WinCustomize Forums Top
In my experience finding performance problems is rarely intuitive and often requires focused analysis tools to find the culprit. I once worked on a project where a given piece of code written by a junior engineer looked up a data item. Since he thought it wouldn't happen very often he used a linear search. When we brought the product up it performed very poorly (an understatement). After much analysis we figured out that his little search routine was being called 30,000 times per minute and was using 98%+ of the cpu time for our app. Changing 12 lines of code changed our response time from 2.3 minutes to 8 seconds!

Seldomseen, Did you notice the cool traffic report client you can run? Thats how they get their numbers. They also have code snippets for web pages (check the side bar for links).
Reply #96 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Don't know about anyone else, but I am back to watching rocks grow with incrdibly slow page draws, especially the forums.
Reply #97 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Cap'n,
Thanks for the link! I'll go check out the traffic report first thing!

kenwas,
Me, too. Just got back from skinnalicious and skinartistry, and they're faster. I'm surfing...seeing if I got the right graphics app for the complete noob: Corel PSP X at Best Buy $99. Said I could return it if I don't break the seal.

Apologies for stomping on the thread. I'll never do it again
Reply #98 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Right now I'm posting with MSN Explorer. If I try to get to WC with Firefox I get a page stating the WC is down to to server maintenence.
Reply #99 from WinCustomize Forums Top

The site is about as fast as a sloth on sleeping tablets.

Seems to me the speed was lost the day the post edit feature was put back... could be a co-incidence, but there was a noticable drop in speed from a week last Monday onwards