Trakt Performance Upgrades

We’re sorry for all the issues over the last few months, they really suck. We’ve been working on daily performance upgrades to help eliminate the 521, 524, and related errors on the Trakt website and Trakt API. Here’s some detailed info about what’s going on.

What is causing all the errors?

Trakt continues to grow in popularity (which is great!) and that means more members and more data being consistently added. We’ve also discovered several poorly coded API apps that spam user accounts with millions of duplicate plays.

What have you done so far to fix this?

Trakt performance is our top priority and we’ve been working every day on upgrades, bug fixes, and data cleanup. Here’s a list of what we’ve implemented so far.

• Doubled our database. We’ve doubled the specs of our database to handle requests faster. This of course comes with double the price, and we sincerely thank all VIPs since your membership directly pays for server costs!
• Improved auto scaling for the website and API. This automatically adds additional servers to handle increased traffic during peak times.
• API rate limiting. This helps deal with apps spamming the API and overloading user accounts with duplicate data. Rate limits help stabalize performance for all apps that use Trakt.
• Locking user accounts with duplicate data. When a rogue app spams a user account with duplicate data, it overloads the user account with too much data and leads to 524 timeout errors. We lock accounts that have too much data. The user can ask the app developer to fix the bug and Trakt support can fix the user account.
• Server configuration tweaks. This is ongoing, but we’re regularly implementing configuration tweaks to all the behind the scenes services that power Trakt.

What else do you have planned?

We still have more work to do. The above list is an ongoing thing and here’s what else is planned.

• Additional database upgrades. We’ll have some scheduled downtime to perform additional database upgrades in the near future. We announce these on Twitter.
• Improved caching. The better we cache things, the better performance is. We have several ideas to improve caching throughout the website and API.
• API. We’re researching additional ways of stabilizing the API performance for all apps. This includes more specific rate limiting and potentially new API methods.
• User data managements tools. Self service tools to help users clean up their own accounts and remove duplicate data. We also want to help users alert offending apps that are sending duplicate data.

Thank you!

We really appreciate all your support and patience while we figure this out.

-Trakt