The Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) has become one of the highest traffic sites within the Joomla family, and our own Brad Baker recently posted a blog about just how heavily it's used. He analyzed our Joomla site hosting at Rochen's team blog.  As a result, Rochen will be moving the whole site to a new server at :

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=26&month=4&year=2010&hour=7&min=0&sec=0&p1=240

The JED may have limited connectivity during DNS propagation, but we should be moved without incident over the course of that three hours.

Heavy Traffic Requires a New Server

You may have noticed JED downtime over the past few weeks, and it's been due to the tremendous amount of simultaneous sessions ... sometimes around 15,000 active sessions.  That's 15,000 actively connected users of the JED in a given 30 minute period of the day.  Rochen will be coming to our rescue yet again by providing us with a faster, more powerful server.

Thank You to Our JED Editors

The traffic on the JED only tells part of the story.  With the increase in extensions to 4774 GPL products for Joomla, the traffic increase of 30% across the board over the past year pales in comparison to the exponential increase in votes and reviews.

Reviews and votes have become so prolific over recent months that the JED reached a 30+ day backlog of review approvals and worse in extension approvals during February.

As I blogged about last month, we were able to clear that buildup with the help of our newest associate, Pierre and the hard work of our existing editors. Pierre and the team will get to take a much-needed three hour break during the server move while we allow DNS to propagate.

But approving and moderating reviews and extensions is just one of the many ways our editors contribute.

I'd like to take this opportunity, while I have your attention, to recognize Peter van Westen, a JED editor whose main focus is writing our administrator plugins and components.  Peter has introduced a few crucial new user analysis and management add-ons to the JED which allow us to get a new angle on fraudulent voting and reviewing.  Peter has been instrumental in cleaning up large portions of invalid votes and reviews.  We don't usually make a big deal out of the negative in the JED, so without this little departure we may never have even mentioned these additions.

Thank you for your patience during our server move.  We hope the increased power of our new server will make the JED smoother for everyone.