AA7BQ's State of the Site Address

Greetings loyal QRZ fans.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's had the patience to stick with us while we have upgraded both our equipment and, more importantly, our software. There are a lot of comments floating about, some positive and some negative however most folks aren't aware of what has gone on behind the scenes so I thought I'd write a few things about it.

Let's start with the why part of the question. Why did we change our site's appearance and many of its functions? That's the easy part, it was performance. A lot of people were aware that the QRZ site had been getting very slow before the upgrade. We have been serving upwards of 200,000 pages per day from our site and the load on our server has been relentless. Last month we swapped out servers hoping to make things better but it didn't work. The new server became instantly overloaded just like the old one, despite the fact that it has three times the memory (1.5 gigabytes) installed.

I should have known better before I bought the new machine because during the day I'm a computer systems engineer. One of the first rules in performance tuning is that of all the different ways of improving performance, none are as effective as improving the program that the computer runs. A sloppy program can make even the biggest supercomputer come to its knees and ours was well beyond that point. The performance meter on our system was usually pegged at 100%, almost all the time. It was simply running as fast as it could and could do no better. It was time to bite the big bullet.

Changing our software isn't easy. Had I not bought the new server I couldn't have done it because I needed the old server to use as a test platform. Fortunately, it all worked out and after weeks of after-hours work it finally paid off. The measured performance on the new system is easily two times that of the old system. Response times (how long you wait for a page to return) has been significantly reduced, down from many seconds to almost instantaneous. Finally, there's room to breathe and grow.

The problems with the old system were many. To start with, it was built up from several different software packages, none of which were designed to coexist with each other. I spent hundreds of hours programming the old system, fixing this, patching that, and generally using a crowbar to make things work that weren't designed to do the job. Eventually it just became a huge hairball of programming code. Every single page that the system presented required the startup and shutdown of half a dozen programs - just to display the home page! It was no wonder that our server was choking on it all.

The old system was composed of the callsign database, the main page generating code (Slashdot), and a crappy piece of Forum software called WWWThreads. Sure, there was some nice visual effects to it all, but, the server was groaning just to keep it all running - or almost running.

Today, we have a completely new approach. Basically, QRZ is composed of two major sections, the Forum (where you're reading this article now), and the custom QRZ software that provides everything else. Except for the forum, I've created every line of software that runs the site. That includes the callsign database, the biographies, the pictures, information files, everything. Fortunately, most of that part of the code was still in good shape and remains in operation today.

So much for the technical side of things. There were some other reasons to change. The second big reason was feature enhancement. Now I know that a lot of folks were satisfied by the features we had before and that some a bit put off by all the new buttons, menus and options the new system provides. Fortunately, most of the new features won't get in your way if you choose to ignore them or wait until you become more comfortable before trying them out.

Next, I'd like to address a few of the questions that have been coming in about the new system:

[*]Why isn't there a button to Login on the home page?
Well, stated simply, the new site de-emphasizes logins. If you reach a point in the system where login is required, the system will let you know. There's no reason to login unnecessarily.

[*]I miss the UTC time display that used to be on the home page.
Removing the time display was done to speed up performance. It's basically one less program we have to run to pull up the home page.

[*]The system no longer displays my callsign or login name on the home page.
Same reason as before - not needed and wastes computer cycles. The home page doesn't care if you're logged in or not. The Forum, however, does display your callsign/name and the UTC time.

[*]I can't find the Preferences menu so I can change my password.
This is located in the Forum, and is called Your Control Panel.

[*]I hate Frames. Why did you put Frames on the new site?
The short answer is that the main menu stuff doesn't change as you go from page to page. Since that's the case it doesn't make sense to reload it every time you change pages. It lightens the server load to leave it in its own separate frame.

[*]The new site doesn't fit on my 600x800 / 14 inch monitor. I have to scroll a lot.
We're really sorry about that, but, we just have a lot of information to display. You may want to look into getting a bigger monitor and/or upgrade your display card. (The site looks fine on my laptop computer with its modest 1024x1280 display)

[*]I like the site but some of the fonts are too small, making it hard for me to read.
Fortunately, we have a solution for this. There are Control Panel options called "skins" that allow us to choose from several available overall size options. I haven't had the time to work on all of these but I'll be getting to it soon. Be forewarned, however, that when the font size increases, so does the overall width of the page. You'll definately do a lot more scrolling if you choose a large font option.

In closing, I'd just like to say that while the site is up and running, there are still a few little kinks and bugs here and there, pages not found, things not working correctly, etc.. I'm working on these things one-by-one as they come in and over the next couple of weeks we should get most of them weeded out.

Thanks for your patience and support,

-fred