Seconded. Brilliant work on the part of Trang, and anyone else involved.

She rocks! :)

Greatly done, Trang, and many thanks to you. ☺

+1,000,000,000,000

Thank you all =)

The cause for the recent slowdown was not obvious, but it was not too difficult to identify. And it was very easy to solve. The tough part was to figure out where to focus the investigations.

Before I found out what was the cause, my main fear was that the slowdown was caused by the growing number of sentences in the corpus, and if that was the case, it would have been much more difficult to fix. But it turns out that even with 5+ million sentences, we're still fine.

The problem was related to the lists, and it was a problem that existed ever since we introduced the lists feature, years and years ago. It was just clearly noticeable before because we had less traffic on the website, and because we also had less sentences added to lists.

If nobody used the lists feature and we had just a couple thousand sentences added to lists, the website would have kept good response time. But we have over 1 million sentences added to lists today.

If you were visiting the website while only a few other people are browsing at the same time as you, you would also not notice any significant slowdown, because with fewer visitors the server can manage to process your request right away.

If however you visit the website during rush hour, that's pretty much the same problem as when you go to the supermarket during rush hour. You have to wait in line. The server cannot work fast enough, it cannot process your request right away and you have to wait for it to process the requests of everyone before you.

Anyway, the crisis is over, and it's a relief. But this episode is clearly a warning that we should invest more efforts in optimization, to keep the server healthy. This is not really my cup of tea but thankfully, we have a rising active developer, Zach, who joined us back in April this year, and who will be helping on this task :)

I didn't know the search feature had been restored until a moment ago! I was going through withdrawals from not being able to search. Thanks for fixing the problem!