Alert: planned system upgrades

Some of you have been experiencing a range of problems inside the PhotoMerchant Application and a slow loading times on your website. Some of these issues have been going on for some time time, others are new and bizarre. Thank you to everyone who has submitted a problem to our help desk and helped us research the problem.

The problems you may have experienced are:
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  • Slow loading category based galleries (website)
  • Sluggish performance during checkout (website)
  • Long pauses when viewing the dashboard and customer orders (admin)
  • Gallery Order page appearing blank (admin)
  • And a few others…

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Over the past two days we have performed a thorough “biopsy” on the PhotoMerchant application servers and database. The good news is, we now know what has been causing the problems and we know how to solve them. The bad news is that we will need to make iterative adjustments to our database which is likely to cause some periods of downtime over the coming week.

This will mean that your Website and the PhotoMerchant Admin Interface will be unavailable for brief periods of time – most less than half an hour, and at worse, up to two hours. We are planning these outages so that they will have minimal impact on your productivity.

The result of these outages should see dramatic speed improvements on your website and in the admin area. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Stay tuned for updated to this blog post and the Help Desk for more.

Written by

Kain is a co-founder, creative and marketing director at Fotomerchant. You've probably seen his template designs, blog posts and video content. His photography website lomovision.net is home to a collection of lomography, instagram and experimental photography.