Tuesday, May 24, 2011

It's been a tough month for New FamilySearch Affiliates

If you have tried this month to test any of the FamilySearch affiliate programs you may have noticed long delays, freezing, issues with logins, slowness, etc.  This probably did not give you confidence that these programs worked. This has not been the month for testing affiliate programs.

A couple of weeks ago Amazon had server problems.  FamilySearch uses Amazon servers and there were connection issues using NFS depending on which servers you were being routed through.  While this was happening FamilySearch was dealing with their own server issues. The FamilySearch affiliates that sync with NFS can only work as good as the connection is to NFS.  Bad NFS connection = bad response in affiliate software.

No sooner did we think things were resolved than a new situation comes up.  FamilySearch gave the following notice Monday to the affiliates, updating them on what was happening.

Affiliates,
Beginning Friday May 20th between 5:00 and 6:00 PM we have been experiencing some extreme internal network issues in our data center. This has caused major performance issues with our Production APIs. Our Operations Team has been working on the issue over the weekend and will continue to work around the clock until the problem is resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to both you and your customers.
I will be sure send out another email when the problem has been resolved.
Thank You!
FamilySearch Developer Support
FamilySearch did send out another email today on the situation.
From FamilySearch support:
Affiliates,
 
Our Operations Team was able to locate a bad piece of network equipment that was causing the issues. The equipment was removed and replaced last night and things have returned back to normal. Again we apologize for the slowness over the weekend. Thank you for your patience as we worked through these problems!
 
FamilySearch
I would encourage anyone that has been trying to test out any of the affiliate programs during this past month to take into consideration the problems going on with the new FamilySearch website.  Please try the programs again, if performance issues made a big factor in your decision on which program to use.

Popular Affiliate Software: Ancestral Quest, Family Insight, Legacy Family Tree and RootsMagic

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you tell me what it means when you say "FamilySearch uses Amazon servers ?" Are these servers owned and operated by Amazon.com, servers manufactured by some company named Amazon, or what?

Renee Zamora said...

Yes, the servers are owned and operated by Amazon. Amazon leases/rents server space to many companies including FamilySearch.