Planned Website Upgrades (Part 2)

An update on our plans for improving the performance of spotlight.com. We’ve now launched the first set of improvements to our site, and we’re seeing a small but noticeable improvement in site availability and response time. Pages that don’t rely heavily on Spotlight’s database appear to be significantly quicker, but we’re still seeing slowdowns and delays on database-heavy pages such as performer searches and the Spotlight Link. We have three improvements that we’re planning to launch during the week starting August 8th.

Firstly, we’re installing another database server – just like the one above. We’ve done an in-depth review of our website code and come up with a way to split our databases across two separate servers, so there’s one box dedicated to search cards, CVs and suggestions, and another completely separate box dedicated to the Spotlight Link breakdowns and e-mails for agents and performers. This means busy breakdowns will no longer cause delays for casting directors using the search and suggestions areas of our site, and gives us enough capacity to continue developing and launching new features without affecting other areas of our website.

Second, we’re introducing something called a “web application accelerator” – a specialist software component that’s designed to dramatically improve the performance of particular pages. We’re using a system called “Varnish”, which is the same system that Facebook uses to cope with their 750 million active users. This isn’t quite as simple as just plugging it in and switching it on – we’re having to modify quite a lot of our code so it’ll work properly with the Varnish accelerator in place – but we’ve identified a couple of key areas where these improvements should be relatively quick, so we’ll be rolling this out as soon as we can.

Finally, the improvements to Spotlight’s photograph database is nearly completed, but we’ve made some pretty drastic changes to the way this works behind the scenes and since photographs are such a key part of the casting experience, we’re going to hold off launching this until we’ve had a chance to test it thoroughly and we’re confident it’s not going to cause any issues.