Another quarter with steady growth on all fronts.

Website Growth & Performance Demands

It is interesting to follow the average page views per month from year to year for .
2007 Q3 – 0.1 million views/month
2008 Q3 – 1.1 million views/month
2009 Q3 – 2.5 million views/month
2010 Q3 – 4.4 million views/month

As the traffic continues to grow we need to make performance optimizations to handle the workload. In a post on Monday I alluded to some changes that might be noticeable by repeat visitors. The major update that I made was a performance optimization that affected nearly every page of the website. As a result many pages started loading significantly faster.

We migrated from using ASP.Net’s stored procedure profile provider for custom user information to using direct queries with Microsoft’s LINQ to SQL. This made it very easy for us to make highly targeted, optimized, and secure queries just when we needed the information.

This is just the first of many performance improvements we plan to make to the site. Over the next few weeks I will discuss a monumental change that we have in the works. Hint: The future is cloudy.