UPDATE: Okay. It’s up. Let’s see if it stays up. I’ll blog about various changes soon. You’ll notice some missing recommendations. The site will go down at 3am EST.

I’ve got good news to report on the database front. I’ve made something of a break-through. On the nastiest queries—for example, determining what 20 users share the most books with you and how many they share—it now performs 500 times faster than before. You probably won’t see that sort of increase, but it will be noticeable. If you have more than 1,000 books, visiting your profile will become fun again, not an invitation to wait. And the changes will allow LibraryThing to grow far beyond its current 1,498,000 books.

Although theoretically simple, the changes need to be made dozens of places. And tested. I’m behind on the sleep department, so I may not be able to finish it this evening. It will almost certainly be up by 5pm tomorrow, spiffier than ever. Within an hour or so I expect LibraryThing will surpass both 1.5 million books and 2 million tags.

Thanks to everyone who send letters of sympathy, encouragement and offers of assistance. Incidentally, I love the idea for the down page to sport a falllen pile repair-themed books.

PS: Is it just lack of sleep that makes the phrase downtime update seem linguistically funny?

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