So it’s quite possible that we will meet the 1st of September deadline for launching Stuffed Tracker 2.0. Almost everything is ready, and I am currently preparing a User Guide which would be in PDF format. We originally wanted to create the guide in Adobe InDesign, but due to lack of time we might as well go with an auto-converted-from-Word version, sacrificing quality a little.
Anyway, at the beginning of April 2005 when the main tracking framework was ready, we started collecting statistics data on several large and small friendly sites. 5 months later we’ve managed to accumulate almost 500 megabytes of data!
And this actually helped us to identify the bottleneck in our original database design. We have designed the database in such a way that the same main 6 tables are used for storing tracking data for all sites defined in the tracker. However, this proved to be not so good after all, since this design penalized small sites.
Even if Stuffed Tracker displayed statistics for a small site with little amount of statistical data, we still had to extract these stats from huge common tables, sometimes containing several millions of records! So we did a terrible thing — we’ve made a major product design change only one week before it’s release.
Thankfully, due to a good code design, the change took only 1 day and went smoothly (as far as we can see). Now statistics for different companies and their sites is stored in separate company tables and doesn’t interfere with statistics for other companies and their sites.
This new design adds a little more work for the tracker in several places, but what is much more important — the statistical reports generation is now much more efficient in situation when a company with a large site and a company with a small site are tracked using one Stuffed Tracker installation..
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