Season's greetings. Thank you all for sticking with The Mail Archive as we close out the decade. Here's a quick rundown of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs over the past year.
First, let's talk about infrastructure. Our uptime was 99.57% which is similar to previous years. This year's main problem turned out to be the 10K searches per day; sometimes these would clump together and overload computers. Took a while to figure out, and was addressed in November with significant algorithm changes plus moving all search data to solid state storage. In 2010 we continued the longstanding trend of no data loss. Pages continue to serve from rotating rust, specifically traditional disk drives with 8X data redundancy to help minimize latency. I don't know how much to trust third party statistics, but Alexa claims we are faster than 95% of the world's web sites. The corpus grew by 25% this year; not bad for a data set started last millennium. And somebody finally used that nifty "embed an archival link in the message" feature, working out a lot of kinks in the process. For a system designed to run entirely on autopilot, there's a lot of day to day upkeep. Our indefatigable support team responded to almost 600 inquiries during 2010. Wait, who am I kidding? Some of these were exhausting. There have been interoperability challenges with a couple of list service providers. YahooGroups has been particularly evil, they managed to break interoperability with The Mail Archive and we're still not sure if it was deliberate or incompetence. If your list is affected, consider changing service providers or contact our support team for the current workaround. What else? If you enjoyed the multiweek advertisement holiday in November, sorry that's history. We provided a form based interface for advanced search (but I'm sure you all use the advanced command syntax) including sort by date. Total donation dollars remained on par with previous years, but concentrated on better support for fewer entities. None of them computer related for a change. And in personal news, I've found that wearing an extra ring on my hand doesn't slow down typing speed at all. But it very happily means a little more time away from the keyboard. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&r=3m&u=mail-archive.com&u=mit.edu&u=slashdot.org
