I love this player but I'm having some hosting issues since our listening audience is getting so big. I need to be able to change the time limit for the calls to iTunes for the album art. I need to change it so that it doesn't make that call so often. Here is the message I got from my network engineer.

"I can see that 12780 outgoing connections were attempted in the last hour. I'm thinking this could be caused by the songPlaying feature (or some similar feature) of one of the third party extensions installed on the site. If I'm reading the code correctly, every logged in user is doing a POST request every few seconds to poll the song name and metadata. Every time this is polled, the website itself is doing a manual connection attempt to "itunes.apple.com" over port 443 which is served by Amakai, and then that data is relayed back to each user.

I recommend asking the developer of the extension to implement some sort of caching to prevent a 1:1 ratio of connection attempts. In theory this data should only be polled every 30 seconds or so by the server and not every multiple times a minute by each visitor on the site. This could be a design flaw of the components you are using on the site, or maybe there's a caching feature inside of the component that just isn't activated right now. In theory, all visitors to the site should be able to share the same polled data as long as that data is reasonably current. 1:1 ratio of requests every few seconds simply doesn't scale.

One thing that concerns me is that initiating over 50,000+ rapid connection attempts to Amakai every time the site gets busy could actually trigger Amakai's firewall and they could block access to your site. "

Is this something I can do or will the developer have to do it? I definitely need some help with this as I'm currently taxing 4 CPU's and 10 gigs of Ram when we get busy.

Thanks in Advance!

Wade
TexasHoldemRadio.com