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Date Posted	November 16, 2008
News Title	We Need Your Help
Posted By	Michael Ludwick
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We need everyone to download a small piece of software from ALexa. For Firefox it's called SPARKY All other browsers can go to Alexa and Download the proper version. This willl do 2 things. It will allow us to see a usage increase coming and you will be able to get info on every site you visit. It is unobtrusive. I barely notice it on Firefox. All links will open a new window. It takes about 2 minutes to download and install in the background. It will be of great help to the site in many ways. It will show us our real place on the Internet. It will also show everyone else. It will help us see a growth cycle much better. The problem we are having now is people are staying on much longer and talking much more. During the morning reset we used to dip to 900 users now we barely dip to 1350. Traffic starts at 6AM and goes straight to the peak. As it says in all other articles we are taking action and should be able to remedy this situation while the new hardware is being built. Speaking of hardware we use industrial telco grade equipment. It is expensive and they are custom built. They have positive ventilation, wind tunnels,silicone seals, hot swap drives stuffed in a case thinner than a pizza box (1.75 inches high x 19 Inches x 17.5) They will also have dual NIC's (Network ports), This allows us to break traffic up into inbound/outbound/local. Ya just can't go down to CompUSA and get half a dozen of these.We should have 2 online this week which will add 16 GB of memory and improve CPU availability by a factor of 8. If you have any questions feel free to call. I'll be glad to answer any questions. One thing I can't do is answer email. My email box is highly filtered and not an effecient way to provide support. This method has improved our support greatly. What used to take a 6 email volley ball game now takes an average of a 4 minute call.