Super slow sections page?

This is being fixed and rolled out tonight..

Fixes for some issues being pushed out right now

Pages were not working after login and duplicates were being shown.

Massive site improvements are completed for the most part now

We have been very busy for the past few days because of massive scalability and performance improvements under the hood. Truth be told, we have been trying to fix the performance issue for years now. Initially we started with a SQL Server database, increased its hardware, then later moved to SQL Azure, then Azure Caching and now, we have reached a conclusion with Azure Table Level Storage which is a no SQL database and should scale "infinitely". This seems to perform better than all the previous approaches.

The current architecture struggles to scale during times of very high activity, but it seems to hold up the best from all the approaches I have tried so far.

This is not an easy problem to solve - tracking user read contents and showing only fresh contents while sorting news by popularity or age. It seems easy but it has taken years to mature the approach. And we are thankful to all our readers who have supported us by using our app.

Once the major issues are totally sorted out, then we will spend some time on tweaking the small stuff. Once the iPhone 5S and 5C come out and iOS 7 gets released, looks like there might be an issue with the home page because it uses browserdb. I might have to go back to classic mode - just note that if you have any issues with the popular news page, tell us via our facebook page and use the trending news page instead.

Massive site updates continue to roll out...

Please note there will be outages from time to time when we are doing massive updates to the site to improve performance and scalability from end to end.

This time, the performance improvements seem to be sticking.

Expect sporiadic outages

We are slowly migrating from caching to table storage for our backend in azure. This is because we want to improve performance and stability. I will try to keep the downtime to periods where nobody is using the site.