The ClearCheckbook Money Management app for Windows Phone 8 has been approved and is now available to download! We're happy to bring ClearCheckbook to yet another mobile device which makes it easier than ever to stay connected to your finances.
If you're a Windows Phone 8 user, check out the store and search for the ClearCheckbook app. Try it out and let us know what you think by leaving us a comment and rating in the store.
We just submitted the ClearCheckbook Windows Phone 8 app to Microsoft for approval! They said it could take up to 5 business days for the approval to come through. We'll let you know when we're notified of any status changes.
In the meantime, you can check out the Windows Phone 8 app page for some screenshots.
If you've tried to access the site over the last couple of weeks you might have noticed some slow load times or even some site outages. We've been trying to figure out what the problem is and have been updating various aspects of the site, server and database to try to increase reliability.
We finally found the root of the issue and fixed it. There should be no unscheduled down-times or overloaded databases now.
Technical Wording Alert...
We knew the issue was database related. We were keeping track of long running queries that would start causing a snowball effect that would eventually cascade into a database overload. All of the queries were coming from the massive 40+million transactions table in our database.
The problem was there was no rhyme or reason to the long running queries behaving the way they did. They would perform fine on some accounts and not at all on others. We used this as a starting point and worked from there.
We initially thought it was a vacuuming issue (basically keeping the table in check for quick access) where the table was too large and the vacuum would die part way through. That's why we took the site down last night to run a full vacuum on the table. Unfortunately, as many of you noticed today, that didn't help. The issues persisted and the database continued to overload.
Fast forward through a lot of high blood pressure inducing brainstorming and we finally realized the transactions table was highly fragmented across our hard drives. All of the adding/deleting of transactions left data all over the place. This meant it took much longer than normal to access all the data quickly and efficiently.
We ended up dumping and reloading the data cleanly and sequentially on our hard disks and that fixed the problem. Everything appears to be fixed now with the transactions table.
Over the next week we'll be conducing the same action on our other large tables to help improve site performance even more.
We'd like to thank you all for dealing with these issues as we've encountered them. I launched ClearCheckbook in 2006 because I wanted everyone to be able to quickly and easily have access to their financial information. Whenever the site goes down I do my best to be transparent and let everyone know what's going on and work to fix the problems as quickly as possible.
ClearCheckbook has grown tremendously over the last few years (we just passed our 250,000th registered user) and we've had our technical hurdles from time to time. Each time we learn something new and work to make sure nothing like that happens again.
Please rest assured that ClearCheckbook is my #1 focus and we're doing our best to provide you with the best money management site and app suite available.
If you have any other questions, please let us know.
As some of you have noticed about once a week it seems like the site really starts to slow down and get sluggish or not let you log in. This is caused by a few issues which I'll explain below. We're also working to fix these issues so the site continues to run quickly and efficiently in the future.
Issue #1: Complex Database Queries
ClearCheckbook has massive amounts of data we have to process each time you perform an action on the site. To give you a little perspective, we have over 39 MILLION transactions in our database. On an average day we're getting almost 50,000 new transactions added to the site.
This is a lot of data to handle and some of the reports or search functions require processing a lot of this information. The database queries to perform some of these actions are very complex and can take a while to complete. What we've noticed by looking at our logs after a site outage is that people get a little impatient and refresh the page or click the search button several times in a row which adds to the list of complex queries being run. It acts a bit like a snowball where the more of these complex queries that add up, the longer it takes the site to get to other less intense queries. If enough of these build up, it causes the slowdowns you experience.
We're usually around to catch these pretty quickly but sometimes they happen early in the morning before we're at our computers.
Issue #2: Site Growth
This is something we've had to deal with since we launched the site almost 7 years ago. ClearCheckbook is very popular and always seems to be growing. We're not complaining about that at all, but it seems like with each growth spurt we discover new issues that arise due to large amount of traffic hitting the site.
When you combine both of those issues, it means our site is getting used at all times by people all over the world and there's constant database activity. As more people use the site, more of those complex queries are getting regularly run.
What We're Doing:
Each time the site goes down it's because of the database being overloaded. When this happens we can look at the longest running queries to figure out what started the so called "snowball" mentioned above. Whenever this happens, we look at the queries in question and work on optimizing them and the database to prevent this from happening again.
We've fixed countless queries and performed more optimizations to the site than we'd care to admit and we believe we're getting close to optimizing all of these complex queries that take a little longer to run.
I built ClearCheckbook because I wanted a way to easily manage my money. When I made this my full time job in September 2009 it became my main focus and all I wanted was to see the site succeed and help people with their finances.
Whenever the site has these hiccups it may frustrate you, but believe me when I say that it's infinitely more frustrating to me. We have almost a quarter million registered users so whenever there's a site issue I feel like I'm personally letting everyone down.
All I ask is that you're patient with us while we're going through some of these growth spurts. We're constantly working to make the site better by providing updates, new features, quick bug fixes and more.
We did this last year and thought it would be good to give everyone some information about the site from 2012. We had 42,534 new users sign up (43% from mobile devices).
In 2012 we had 2,475,672 visits (466,274 unique) to the site which added up to a total of 15,492,688 pageviews. The average person visits 6.25 pages each time they come to the site and stay for an average of 7:42. All of these stats are up from 2011 which is a great sign.
In addition to the site numbers growing, we were also busy keeping the site updated. Over the course of the year we issued 227 bug fixes, updates and tweaks to the site. There were also 8 major updates / new features in 2012. We added/overhauled the following:
* Auto-Jive Tool
* Balances Timeline in Reports
* iOS app redeveloped
* Investment Portfolio
* Automatic categorization of Imported Transactions
* Re-arranging Transaction Register Columns
* Money Lending Tracker
* Budgets Overhaul
We've already mentioned it recently, but our plan for 2013 is to focus on the mobile apps the first part of the year. We plan on overhauling/updating the existing apps as well as building apps for other mobile platforms such as Blackberry and Windows Phone. Once we have the mobile apps all updated and available for download we will focus on some new features and updates for the site.
