New Frontpage: As you might have seen we have changed the frontpage. The reason for this change is the incease in bandwith usage. Which is cause by the increasing number of torrents uploaded per day combined with the number of visitors which enters the site through the frontpage.
The old frontpage was an average of 150 KB (smaller in the morning, larger in the evening). With 750.000 pageviews on the frontpage, it used 107 GB per day! This is 1,27 MB per second!
The new frontpage is only 35 KB which results in 0,2 MB per second.
We are paying for a 70 mbit connection (8,75 MB per second).
As you can see in this graph this isn’t enough at the end of the day (when the frontpage gets larger than 220 KB).
This is also the reason why mininova got slower in the evenings.
We hope everybody understands this and likes the new frontpage. If you don’t you can use the today page.
Edit (Niek): Added a “show all of today” link under each category, for easier navigation.
Edit (Erik): Added a “Use the today page as my frontpage” setting to the settings page. Setting this option makes your frontpage the same as the old frontpage was.
Search Cloud (Erik): There is now a mininova search cloud. It contains the most searched words of the day. The words get bigger when they are searched for more often. The cloud is empty at the start of the day and will grow as the number of search increases for the day.
Visual passwords (Erik): I have added a cool example for visual passwords to the mininova labs. Don’t worry, we won’t use it for mininova.
Improved search performance (Erik): I have managed to increase the speed of the search queries by almost 400% using a temporary table. The bad thing is that this table is updated only once every hour, so new torrents can take up to 1 hour to show in the search results. The good thing is that we won’t have to buy a new database server because of this.
