Blogger Blues

When I signed on with Blogger, it was freeware supplied by the Pyra Labs. I later learned that the Pyra Labs consisted of several bright, young whippersnappers who created this dead-easy way to create a blog. Subsequently, Google — as those bright, young whippersnappers marched toward a dominant position on the Internet — acquired Pyra Labs and Google. The Blogger CEO Evan Williams and his bright, young whippersnappers came along with the software to Google. Over the last two weeks, I have experienced a frustrating experience while attempting to post to the blog. Frustration for me comes with slow response to a mouse click and Blogger was providing glacial response time to publish or preview or save as draft commands. Now, I know. Blogger is too successful. So many people without a life (like me) are posting whatever to Blogger that the poor servers are in meltdown. What is Google going to do? What will happen to this blog? For answers to these and other fascinating questions, join us tomorrow and in the tomorrows to come. If this is (fair & balanced) consternation, so be it.


Google's Blogger faces performance problems

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Google is working to address performance problems that slow down its popular Blogger service.

Google is both adding new hardware and addressing an electricity-availability issue in order to improve performance, wrote Jason, a Blogger official in an entry posted Thursday in the official Blogger in-house blog called Blogger Status.

"Performance is a huge priority for us and we're adding a bunch of new machines right now to speed things up," Jason wrote. "New machines are not an issue because here at Google we can add them quite smoothly as needed. The real issue is power -- actual electricity, if you can believe it. So now we're adding more power in addition to more machines."

Jason posted his entry after receiving an e-mail from a Blogger user who complained about "slowness issues" with the free service. It turns out that the performance problems not only affect regular Blogger users but also Blogger team members, he wrote.

"We use Blogger for this blog and many of the people on our team use Blogger for their own, personal blogs. We don't have a super-special employee server that gives us preference over anyone else so we are just as frustrated with slowness and performance problems," Jason wrote. "That being said, we are just as eager as you to make this fix so things will be fast again."

Mountain View, California-based Google didn't immediately respond to a call seeking comment about this issue.

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