And here I thought that I was just going crazy …

The last few weeks I’ve noticed that Technorati has been having some difficulties with their pages.  Quite often I would open their site to see if any of my favourites had updated, only to find that my favourites had all vanished.  Often this would repair itself after a few hours … but that’s not the point.  Then the site’s login methods changed earlier this week and that had to be re-configured.  Then I notice that some of their crawlers are taking forever to update sites, but considering the number of blogs they monitor, I can certainly understand why some days will see a nine to ten hour delay in updating pages.

But earlier today when I tried to visit my site and found that, yet again, it was slower than grandma on the freeway, I was none too happy.  Turns out the Technorati Search plugin was to blame.

Last weekend the SETI@Home servers went down, and this was causing one of my other plugins to timeout, which meant that visitors had to wait about 61 seconds to see my site.  I don’t know about you, but unless I’m trying to Google instructions on removing snake poison while on dialup using a cell phone in the middle of a predator-filled Chilaen rain forest, I never wait 61 seconds for a page to load.  Even though SETI’s servers are back up, I think I’ll leave the plugin off for a little bit.

However, today’s slowdown was actually caused by Technorati being offline for a bit.  According to their blog, much of San Francisco lost power, and Technorati’s offices were subject to darkness.  What’s interesting is that their backup generators didn’t kick in to prevent the servers from going offline, but I guess this will keep their IT people busy for the next little bit.

They’re currently getting the crawlers up and running, so hopefully downtime will be minimal.

With all the websites out there that rely on content from other sources, it’s absolutely amazing how much of the world can be affected when certain parts of the web are missing.  This has certainly given me much to think about in terms of how I can re-write some of my PHP and 3rd-party plugins to react to such failures, and I think some of the solutions can be done relatively quickly.  It’s quite funny that I let my site get in to such a situation in the first place.

What plans do you have in place for events like this?  If sections of your site need to call to other servers, do you load those services last?  I’m interested to know what your take on the matter is.