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Boilermaker, the historic 15K road race in Utica, NY, opened up a Loyalty Program registration this morning at noon. They are opening up registration only to finishers of last year’s race for a week – next weekend they will open remaining slots to everyone else. In the first 10 minutes over 1,800 people registered. 30 […]
UPDATE: the migration was successful. It took 2 minutes from 10:45 – 10:47. There were no lost transactions, but some people did have to wait on the checkout page or click refresh. A second migration ran from 3:00PM- 3:04 PM. We are doing database maintenance and updates this morning. This may cause minor delays of […]
In 2014 we had outages totaling 16-21 minutes (depending on how you count an outage) for an availability of 99.996%. This is down from 99.998% in 2013. As usual, we do a year end (well, almost – there are still 7 days to go as this is written) report on our availability for the year. […]
Our site was down from 6:31 PM Eastern for about 8 minutes. This was due to a deployment we did, which ironically enough was to help prevent issues if the Amazon Content Delivery Network was unavailable, we would be able to quickly recover from that. We have since deployed the change successfully with no interruption.
It looks like some transactions this afternoon about 4:19 PM Eastern were having trouble being processed by First Data. These are fixed as of 5:12 PM Eastern. Registrants would have seen an error message stating that the Payment Processor Network is Unavailable and to try again. Most transactions were going thru, but races may want […]
We had a 5 minute outage early this morning for 5 minutes at 12:53AM Eastern time. We were doing a deployment and it triggered errors. That error was corrected as quickly as possible. We apologize for the outage. This deployment we did was part of investigating a tricky bug that is causing 1 error per […]
We have updated our public facing servers with the patch for this new security vulnerability that was found and reported on yesterday. Here are is a link to learn more if you are interested, or to check to make sure your own servers have installed this: http://www.csoonline.com/article/2687265/application-security/remote-exploit-in-bash-cve-2014-6271.html Note there are likely more patches coming from the […]
In our ongoing effort to report all availability issues, we experienced a partial issue this morning from about 5:30AM until 8:30AM Eastern. Due to our high level of redundancy, we processed transactions throughout and user would have only had an issue on their initial connection to the site and upon clicking refresh they would have […]
Innovation: The act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods. As technology people, we love the opportunity to continually innovate and bring new features to the table…but don’t mistake innovation for instability. We believe innovative technology should still be reliable technology. Have ideas? Challenge us!
As always, we report any availability issues in the spirit of transparency. We did a database migration early this morning to better support International customers. The migration took 3 minutes and 29 seconds to complete. During this time, the site functioned fully with two caveats. If someone was trying to check out at that time, […]
We had about 2 minutes at 7:25 AM Eastern this morning where about half of requests were not being serviced properly. No transactions were lost, but users would have had to click refresh on their browsers. There was an unusual bug on one of our http servers where requests were not properly rerouted to the […]
If you are a major geek, you know that the Heartbleed Bug was recently found and started to be exploited. I am happy to report that we have implemented the fix as shown in this test. Please let website owners that you use know about this. The test can determine if their systems are vulnerable […]
The Spring Lake 5 opened for private registration this morning. Previous participants received an email last week giving them a special password to register for one of 7,500 spots that is open on Feb. 1 at 5:00AM for previous registrants. This year, the Spring Lake 5 moved to RunSignUp. We did a load test before […]
We upgraded to the new m3.large instances type on our Amazon Web Servers at 4:15 PM today. Our average response time fell from about 100 milliseconds of time spent in the web server to about 50 milliseconds. If you can catch that 0.05 seconds on a stopwatch, you might notice a difference. But if you […]
On Dec. 30 we made a change to the system. Today we discovered that it caused some (about 59%) confirmation emails to participants to not be sent. We have fixed the error, and have resent confirmation emails that were not previously delivered. There is nothing that needs to be done by race directors or participants. […]
Our 2013 Availability was 99.9981% for the year. We screwed up twice, and had one planned outage for a total “downtime” of less than 7 minutes for the year and partial registration impact affecting about 15% of customers for about 115 minutes. This is an improvement from the 14 hours and 36 minutes, or 99.933% […]
UPDATE: THE ERROR HAS BEEN CORRECTED. LOOKS LIKE WE IMPACTED REGISTRATION FOR ABOUT 2 HOURS. FULL REPORT LATER. POSTMORTEM: One of our employees was handling a support call when they inadvertently accessed a configuration page on our Administrative pages. They accidentally reset a merchant identifier parameter that is used to pass transactions to the credit […]
Over the past two weeks our Payment Gateway provider, Braintree, has had a couple of outages. This impacted some users who were trying to pay. The first outage was on November 6 from 4:45-5:02 PM Eastern time. This outage was caused by network maintenance that impacted their database cluster. During this time, no registrations were […]
One of the Amazon servers went into a hang mode yesterday (always on a Sunday ;-). As we have written before, all of our servers are set up in a redundant fashion, but there are always “gotchas” that you can only learn from experience. We did not have down time, but the site was slow […]
As we have committed to, we do a bi-annual report on Availability of the RunSignUp Service. As previously reported, we put a lot of effort in during 2012 to create a multi-faceted approach to high availability for our customers. During the first half of 2013 we only screwed up badly once. This was due […]
We did a deployment this afternoon at around 2:15 PM Eastern that updated some of our infrastructure (a new version of SQS, which is the queuing service from Amazon that we use). We had done testing on it in our test servers, but when it deployed it caused issues. The net effect before we were […]
Knock on wood. Our availability improvements in 2012 have proven to keep us on track. Even with a massive upgrade with Clubs earlier this week we have zero downtime in 2013. I hope we didn’t just jinx ourselves 😉
Today we made a nice update to our Discount/Membership capabilities to better support Triathlons by giving Race Directors and Triathletes a very simple way to add USAT Insurance. To accomplish this, we needed to update some pages for race directors as well as participants. More importantly, we had to update the database structure to not […]
I am really, really upset today. It would be very, very simple for race directors and registration companies give RunSignUp a call to do load testing before they go live. We offer this as a service to any race – you don’t need to use us! “We offer this as a Testing Service as […]
RunSignUp has a number of advantages over older registration systems. We’ve talked a lot about our Cloud architecture providing a scalable infrastructure. Our rapid pace of software development is also allowing us to meet the needs of our race directors and timers. There are several important parts to this: Cultural. We listen to our users […]
