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Downtime ahead

September 29, 2009

For a few weeks now, we have been promising great improvements to fluxiom in the fall, building upon the new back-end we have been setting up for you during the first part of 2009. Well, fall it is!

After bringing on interface tweaks and new features, we are now ready to pulverise a few bottlenecks in our thumbnails and preview management system.

On October 9 at 10:00 AM Vienna time (see in your time zone), our administrators will take fluxiom into maintenance mode for two hours, during which new servers will be sprung into action. Worry not, your data will be safe and sound, but we need to disconnect the network temporarily while the processing machines are being shuffled around.

Around noon, fluxiom will be back with brand new code, and will start re-generating thumbnail previews for all your assets.

As soon as it is brought back online, the service will be fully available to you and your users, without restriction, but you may notice that all your thumbnails aren’t here yet, replaced instead by generic “file type” icons: this is no cause for concern, and simply means the system hasn’t fully refreshed your account yet. Priority will be given to paying accounts, of course, and we expect everything to neatly finish over the week-end.

Amongst the new features we will be launching are:

Bandwidth-efficient thumbnail generation — We now generate three sizes for each thumbnail, allowing us to present the best-looking and lightest possible file to the user. This speeds up the fluxiom interface dramatically, especially over slower connections, and makes for sharper, more beautiful images.

Super fast processing — Once the initial refresh is over, fluxiom will process your thumbnails up to 4 times faster, and this includes complex files.

Video skimming — You can now see key frames of your video clips by hovering over their thumbnails right from the fluxiom interface. Video previews will also look sharper and behave better.

Faster fluxUp! — Because fluxUp! is so tightly integrated with our processing system, it can now run up to 8 times faster in its default configuration.

Finally, we will grab the occasion to improve the overall fluxiom interface, focusing on the behaviour of thumbnails and previews. There will be no unsettling change but a smooth improvement over what you already know and use, based on both user feedback and our internal usability reviews.

As always, if you have any questions, please get in touch with our support specialists, who will be delighted to provide you with any additional information you may require. We appreciate your continued patronage, and are looking forwards to fluxin’ with you all on the new system.

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