A few moments ago, we submitted Foxmarks 2.0.34 to the Firefox Add-ons site. Existing users of any earlier version of the extension should receive update notifications through Firefox. Please note that if you upgrade from version 1.0.1 to this version (or any other version of Foxmarks 2) that you need to update all of your computers, as Foxmarks 1 and Foxmarks 2 do not sync with each other. For details of what’s new in this upgrade, check out our original post.
We’re monitoring the upgrade process closely from our end and expect that everything will go relatively smoothly, especially compared to the bumpy attempted launch in November. Once it’s clear that everything is stable, we’ll post more information here for the curious about how we improved our capacity compared to last month. We’re not superstitious by nature, but in this case we’ll try to avoid jinxing anything by declaring a premature victory.
Update: We’re several hours in to the upgrade now, and from all signs, things are going well. We’re converting a bit over one user per second to Foxmarks 2 (well over 10,000 so far). We’ve heard from a few folks with problems — not surprising given the size of the audience — but on a percentage basis, more than 99.5% of users are converting without complaint.
Update 2: We’ve had 60,000 users successfully upgrade thus far. We’re making some adjustments right now, shifting load amongst the servers to try to get things to move faster. We appreciate your patience.
Update 3: As many of you have observed, our servers are super-slow right now in responding to all of the traffic, with wait times of as much as 3 minutes to sync; some users are getting “Connection Reset” errors. We know it’s frustrating to you, but hope you can be patient as the new system digests all of the incoming data — we’ll get there. Also, please try not to confuse slowness with complete failure — Foxmarks 2 is working, but we have more than 500,000 users to migrate to the new system. In the past 24 hours, we’ve migrated over 72,000 users, and we’re working to increase the rate of migration. Don’t lose faith!
Update 4: Well, it has been a rough day for the elves here at Foxmarks Central. If you are a Foxmarks user, it was no doubt a rough day for you, too. We took advantage of the recent quiet period this evening to re-engineer one component and tune the overall system. As the East Coast of the U.S. comes online tomorrow morning, we’re anticipating another rush — likely smaller than today’s, but probably still challenging for us. As several of the commenters in the thread below have observed, things will return to normal once we’re through this transition. In the meantime, we appreciate whatever patience you can muster.
Update 5: From our vantage here at Foxmarks Central, we can now — finally! — see the storm clouds clearing. Thursday should bring the first glimpses of the sun since the launch process began, and on Friday, we forecast clear skies. For those who don’t appreciate metaphor: on Thursday we expect server performance to approach normalcy. By Friday, everything should be — dare we say it? — normal.
Thanks to those of you who were patient through this ordeal, and especially to those of you who voiced support for what we’re doing. This has been difficult for us, too, and your kind words helped power us forward. To those of you who have been critical: we understand your frustration, and apologize for the inconvenience we’ve caused you. But to the person who referred to Foxmarks as “the Vista of Firefox Extensions”: that, sir, was uncalled for and below the belt.
We’ll be doing a post here tomorrow that explains more about what we’re doing and why. Please stay tuned for more.
Update 6: The bad news is that we didn’t get to make the blog post today that we talked about doing yesterday — please check back here tomorrow for that. The good news is that we have continued to dial in improvements in server performance, as many of you have noted this evening. We are also now well past the big wave of user upgrades, so we can now start to shift from crisis management to ongoing care and feeding. The service is definitely on the mend; tomorrow should be good day.