Scratch

Thanks, everyone, for your patience while we sorted out yesterday's glitch with comments!

Most of you probably know what it's like to have a glitch in your Scratch projects. It can be hard to figure out what's going wrong! In many ways, the Scratch website is basically just a really big / complex Scratch project. So it can get glitches too now and then. You guys are often the first to notice, so it's helpful when you post here or use the contact us link to let us know.

For those who are curious, we think we've traced the problem to an updated version of a piece of software called memcached. The Scratch website is really two servers - a web server that displays the pages, and database server - where all the comments and projects are stored. When someone views a page on the website, the webserver asks the database to give it the comments and projects on the page, and when it gets an answer it displays the whole page. Normally this works fine, but if a lot of people are on the Scratch website at the same time it can makes the database server have to do a lot of work - so much that it starts to slow everything down.

Memcached's job is to keep the information on pages that lots of Scratchers are viewing handy, so the database doesn't have to do too much work. It's kind of like an assistant who can answer a lot of the same questions that get asked often. This saves the boss (database) a lot of time and makes things run more smoothly.

Of course, if memcached has some problems, and starts to give the wrong answers - or only old ones - well, then, that's a tricky glitch to figure out! Luckily, things seem to be running smoothly again now.