Recent Blogs


Manually Add Referred Registrations

With the release of our Automated Referral Rewards program, some race directors have been approached by participants wanting to get credit for a registration. This may come about because they did not share their specific link with the referral tag, or they talked with…

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Failover for Read Replica Database

Yes, we know these infrastructure updates are kind of boring. But we want to document them. This one involves if there is a loss of connection to the read replica database(s). It now auto-failovers to the master database. We had two instances…

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More Performance Improvements

We continue to do our annual big infrastructure update. Improvements to date have decreased average page load time across all devices (over 50% are mobile phones) from about 3.2 seconds to 2.85 seconds. While that does not sound like a lot, that…

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Web Server Upgrades

We have upgraded our web servers to PHP 5.6. to continue to keep our software stacks up to date. We have also upgraded our log handling mechanism. We now save logs for 3 years in AWS S3. We make use of the the Amazon…

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Upgraded Load Balancer Error Handling

As we continue to upgrade our infrastructure over these few weeks, we have improved our error handling and auto-recovery on our NGINX load balancers. What this means is if there are network or server problems, the system we have in place will…

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Confirmation Email Customization

We have made major improvements to the Confirmation Email, and created a number of mechanisms for you to customize it to your needs. First, we redesigned the layout to be easier to read. Then we included the following features: Set this up…

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Upgraded Infrastructure Hardware

We have also completed an upgrade of our hardware infrastructure over the past week. This includes upgrades to our front end load balancers, our web servers and our database server (we left the memcache servers the same since they are so over-sized…

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Participant Report Speed Up

You may have noticed a speed up in the Participant Reports on your race dashboard. We did some optimizations of the queries as part of our infrastructure upgrades. We are also benefiting from the upgrade we made to the Aurora Database yesterday. The…

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Amazon Aurora Database Upgrade

We did a major database upgrade to Amazon Aurora MySQL this morning (with zero downtime!). This upgrade increases performance, improves scalability, improves reliability, availability and positions RunSignUp for continued growth and change. We were one of the Beta test sites for Aurora, and were…

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Site Upgrade Monday Morning

UPDATE: This is now complete. We had Zero transaction loss. We had registrations completing during the process successfully. We think that 3 users had to wait up to a minute for their registration to complete (the running guy at the end of…

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