Opening the Kimono and November Wrap-up

November was slow. No, really, the site was waaayyyy slow and we hated that. That’s why in November we really only launched two things:

• Historical post stats
• Friend/Blog surfer

Compared to our usual rate of 5-15 new features a month, this was glacial, but we made the decision to focus entirely on fixing bugs and making the service as fast as humanly possible. To that end we’ve added over 30 new web servers, are testing out a new acceleration service called Netli, and most importantly found the bug in MySQL that was causing our site to slow to a halt randomly every few hours. (For the geeks: MySQL uses a really innefficient way of clearing out the query cache, ours was at 1GB so when it filled up it would lock the DB server for 1-2 minutes while clearing it out.)

Now that things are screaming fast again and we’re breaking traffic records every day, we’re ready to get back to fun stuff in December, as evidenced by the new themes we’ve been doing this week. 🙂

Also the friend surfer has been really successful, over 20,000 blogs have been added to the service!

Here’s what you were waiting for — November stats: 65k blogs, 69k users, switched themes 277k times (even though we didn’t add any new themes!), 1.59 million posts, 256k pages, 855k comments, 4,323 support requests, 365k file uploads, and around 82 million (!) pageviews. (Not counting admin section, images, CSS, RSS feeds, etc.)

Finally, we’ve decided to make many of the stats that we’ve been tracking internally for private use available to you, the general public. Far too many companies and services speak of their numbers in vague terms and toss around stats with no real meaning. We’re not the biggest website in the world, but I think by putting our stats out there now hopefully we’ll start a trend of real transparancy into how larger sites grow and are run.

The stats aren’t always flattering, for example you can see our huge drop in pageviews a few months ago or when signups tanked because things were broken, but I think having the information out there is more important than having it make us look good all the time. I’d be really curious to hear what you think of the different graphs, and which things you think we should be tracking that we aren’t currently.

Without further blabbering, check out WordPress.com’s public stats.

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