Bonanzle put out a call to its members last week to help the tech team test new servers and back-end software by putting it under load.

Things must have gone reasonably smoothly because on Tuesday Bill Harding blogged -

Going to take a first stab at upgrading main server to this new one at 9 PM PST so I can watch it under some somewhat heavy load before tomorrow morning (when it will be under heavier load). Apologies if things get weird this evening. Or tomorrow. There will probably be a stray bug or two here or there, but we’ll stamp them out as quickly as possible.

The background to the migration was explained by Bill in an earlier blog post stating -

We are planning to upgrade the underlying software that runs Bonanzle, but it has required a lot of changes that could potentially break things, so we could use a hand putting the new software through its paces before we put it up live.

For the curious, this new software won’t have any noticeable impact when we do move to it, at least in the short term. It incorporates more than a years’ worth of changes to the underlying engine that runs Bonanzle (Ruby on Rails) — ultimately this upgrade will make it much easier for us to internationalize the site and fix the time zone issues with Bonanzas, amongst other things. But in the near term, our main goal is just to get it running and be no worse off than we are now.

Roughly a dozen people replied to the blog update detailing some minor “wierdness” but nothing traumatic – which is a tribute to the tech skills applied – although there appears to be no further word back from Bill and the team regarding how successful, or otherwise, the tests were.

The “dev” site is currently offline, so I’m unable to have a play, but that is probably intentional by Bill & Co.

Ed