To Cache or Not to Cache

Ben Westermann-Clark

June 17, 2008

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Grooveshark.

A number of weeks ago, we pulled all the songs we had cached (for reliability) thus far and made them available via the clean Flex interface you know and (hopefully) love as Grooveshark [ http://listen.grooveshark.com/ ]. After that, all song caching within Grooveshark was temporarily disabled while we sorted out some bugs with Grooveshark, got everything stable, and prepared to expand the catalog.

About two weeks ago, we started caching again. It didn’t last long [ http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/05/29/thats-weird-my-downloads-keep-failing/ ], though, as our caching server was quickly overloaded since there are just so darn many of you!

On Friday, we re-established everything, felt confident, and implemented caching again. Everything was going swimmingly on Grooveshark (har); that is, until the server required a quick update, and everything went may-day. Because of this, some streaming and downloading within Grooveshark Beta may have been effected for a few hours earlier this afternoon, and, unfortunately, we’ve had to disable caching again.

So if you’re curious what was causing all the craziness earlier today, wondering if we’re ever actually going to start caching songs so that they can be added to Grooveshark, or just pissed off because something else broke on the side, there’s your answer!

Of course, if you notice absolutely anything else being screwy for you, we’d love to hear about it [ bwc@grooveshark.com ] so that we can give you some answers and track down (fix) the problems much more quickly. We depend on you guys, and we love you for all of your help.

Keep in touch!