Rankforest will be undergoing some minor server updates this weekend. Downtime should be limited to a couple of minutes. I’m also working on a new feature that I hope you’ll find exciting. Rankforest will soon start showing Amazon.com sales data for books bought through Rankforest.com. I’ll provide more details when the feature launches.

Update Also be sure to check out the latest new feature.

I just finished pushing a fresh code update to rankforest.com. Included in this update are several bug fixes, many of which went easily undetected. They weren’t harmful, but they sapped the site of some of its energy doing unnecessary work.

I also added a simple update to the book battle view that lets you hover over an image and see its title. This was suggested by a customer who frequently compares many similar looking items and was having difficulty discerning between them.

This update also includes the site notification feature that I mentioned a previous post and is probably the reason you’re here, reading this post.

Most importantly, this release includes major performance updates. The main item listing view should be 2-10x as fast as it was. The detail pages for items was improved similarly. The charts were also the recipient of some optimization love. You should notice your charts loading faster (after the first view anyway).

I have more updates planned over the next few weeks but I wanted to make sure things were blazing fast first. Nothing’s more annoying than a slow site.

I spent a good deal of time testing the new features but won’t deny the possibility that I might have missed something. If you notice any strange behavior don’t hesitate to let me know.

Well, the hosting provider I’m planning on going with has quite a backlog. The 2.5 weeks I had mentioned in a previous post turns out to be more like 5 weeks. That’s really more than I care to wait so I’m planning to just pay more money up front in order to get to the front of the queue. Hopefully I can start tuning the server within the next week and a half. The new Rankforest will be running on a setup similar to the one depicted in the following image, for those that are curious:

(image via o’reilly)

Update: It seems Pound spawns a lot of threads per connection, so I might consider Nginx as the reverse proxy balancer.