Blogspot is getting to be more and more unworkable. On February 18 this was the status report: "In the past several days, we've seen some performance problems with Blogger. In general, the app has been slower and users have encountered an increased number of Internal Server Errors." Nothing improved.

Then there was a status update this past Friday.

In the past several days, we've had a bout of stability problems with Blogger. Yesterday morning, users were encountering errors when trying to login and access their blogs.

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days.

As a Blogger user, I completely understand how unacceptable the performance has been in the past few days and it is the focus of the engineering team to fix these issues.

Simply Appalling is apparently located on one of their most stressed-out servers. I have a couple of test sites that usually respond in a reasonable amount of time. I am currently wasting a minimum of an hour a day simply trying to edit drafts and post. So if I seem a bit unproductive lately, I just want to assure that I'm not more unproductive than usual.

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Since beginning this entry at 2 pm, it is now 3:53 and I'm not sure if this will post. I've since discovered that John Aravosis at AmericaBlog, a much more visited blog than Simply Appalling, is making the same complaint—

Blogger has been freezing for hours every day now. They say they're trying to get to the bottom of it. It's been a year of hell now. I hate moving to another server because blogger is paying for bandwidth, i.e., it's free now. But this is ridiculous. Anybody have an idea of how much bandwidth we'd need to host a blog of this size, with 30,000 people daily traffic?

Attempts to post: at least 15