I’ve been using Rojo for about a year. It’s a nice little web-based aggregator, and suits my usages better than bloglines did. Last week, they rolled out a major update to the site. And, last week, I was going to write something nice and excited about it. It seemed like they had fixed some of the speed issues, and the interface tweaks seem much more polished to me.
Clearly, I didn’t. Because after getting that first glimpse, all of my feeds vanished. Then they were back, but inconsistantly. And the only way that I could read anything was if I told it that I wanted to see all read and undread items in my feeds — not exactly the ideal way to read RSS feeds, especialy when you’re floating somewhere around the 50 or so that I track …
A week or so later, they seem to have gotten all the kinks worked out, though I’m still noticing occasional glitches. From what they say, it was a load thing — they had adapted the site to use a full-on SOA, with various bits of functionality being farmed out as web service calls. Like, for example, what feeds I read. Remarkably, I suppose, the authentication service never had a problem … Anyway, they ran a test environment, which didn’t managed to simulate their real usage loads, and the secondary servers collapsed under the full load.
I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of lessons to be pulled from this, not the least of which is that it seems they did a rather poor job of communicating what was going on, and that it would have been wise to roll back to the previous version after discovering the major (as in, broken core functionality) failures. I’m sure there are some other lessons to be gleaned from browing the reactions posted on their forums, but those strike me as two of the major ones.
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