The blog search engine Technorati suffered from both downtime and slowdown during large periods of December 12 and 13. In those two days, the Technorati website was completely unavailable for a total of more than 9 hours.

This graph shows the uptime percentage per hour on December 12-13 for the Technorati website. The timestamps are in CET (GMT +1).

When the website did respond, it was often much slower than usual. The performance slowdown is clearly visible when looking at its load time, as seen below.

This graph shows the average HTML load time (per hour) on December 12-13 (timestamps are in CET).

By HTML load time we mean the time it took to access the web server and download the HTML code for the page. No images or other external elements were being loaded.

Twitter abuzz with the problems

Technorati’s recent troubles have escaped the attention of the media and the larger blogs so far, but a search for “Technorati down” on Twitter reveals that a lot of people are taking notice. Twitter is usually a pretty good indicator of what is happening on the Web.

Is/was Technorati having database trouble?

Although there is no mention of any problems on the official Technorati blog (at least as of this writing), it looks like Technorati may have run into database trouble.

Alex Lam over at TheBackpackr.com managed to take a screenshot on the 14th of an error page with the following statement: “brb. Ouch! We’ve lost a master database and are restoring from backup. Technorati will be back up soon.” He seems to be located in Malaysia, which means the error message showed up late on the 13th or early on the 14th, European time.

If this is really the case, then the problems we detected could very well have been caused by the failed database.

Second time this month

We recently wrote about an issue that Technorati had on December 3, but the problem that time was of a different nature. That time someone had mistakenly set the access permissions in a way that made the website refuse access to all visitors. This time the problem was that the website simply didn’t respond at all.

If anyone has seen an official statement from Technorati regarding these issues, please let us know in the comments.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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