Much thanks to the folks over at National-Net.com for all their help recently. And of course much thanks to the MadAve programming team. Yesterday we completed a huge migration of our entire SQL database cluster system from a 32-bit environment to tha 64-bit environment.
Might now sound like a lot but it was a huge honking deal. The db cluster consists of six servers. We had to move to six new servers. So this mean setting up whole new boxes, configuring them, several test exports and imports of a HUGE database, tweaking, more testing, etc.
But the whole process is done and I’ve got to say thanks to the hard work of everyone involved it went incredibly smoothly. Yes the system as a whole slowed down for a few hours but nothing completely died, no data was lost, and most importantly we’ve now more than doubled our capacity!
The reason for this move is simple: with a 64-bit environment you can load more RAM into a single server. Our entire database is loaded into RAM as that’s much faster than reading off a hard drive. On the 32-bit environment we could scale by adding more servers. We can, of course still do that. But now we won’t need to do that as often because we can use more RAM / Server. Heh, adding RAM is way cheaper and easier than adding new servers.
So kinda State of the MadAve Union address, here’s where we are. We’ve finished the Simple Interface. We’ve finished the new Traffic Source setup and management interface. We’ve finished the IM Ads. We’ve finished the 32-bit to 64-bit database migration. This week we’re finishing up the complete automation of online buying for Non-Branded / House Ads campaigns. Next week we’ll finish up auto-allocation of House Ads to where if a Publisher doesn’t have any Network Campaigns allocated and hasn’t put up any other Affiliate/Retail/Internal campaigns but does go ahead and put up invocation codes for zones there will automatically be ads displayed. So no matter what there will never not be ads displayed.
And after that? SPEED EVERYTHING UP!! Yes, we’re well aware that the Publisher and Advertiser interface has gotten quite slow. The db migration will help but that’s stop-gap. We’ll be focusing the next couple weeks on optimizing queries and caching as much data as possible to speed up the entire interface. Additionally we’ll be completely redoing the Publisher Reports section. There are a few things that aren’t currently available in the reports (revenue / zone is the most requested) but most everything you could ever want is available in reports now. Just one problem. It’s a pain in the ass to get to! Heh. Remember we built the reports around what we needed for ConsumptionJuction / CJ Traffic. We used MadAve differently than most Publishers.
Yes, we STILL maintain that the best way to make the MOST money off your traffic is to run 10% to 15% of your ad inventory to affiliate programs, use the RPM tools to maximize what you can make, use that to set your prices for Network ads, and sell some yourself on Retail campaigns. That said, we’ve got to look at reality. MOST Publishers on the network simply want us to sell as much as we can. They look at how much they make off that and decide whether we’re making them more money than say etology/aaw/adbrite/etc. So while we’ll always have the tools for you to use if you want to do things the right way, we’re also working hard to make sure that the reports work for you if you just want us to sell everything.
