First I want to thank everyone who has shown support during the last several weeks. It’s been a very stressful time for me, and you are what makes this whole thing worthwhile.

Just to give you an idea of what’s going on, gravatars are currently served in an unscalable way via a php script. This worked fine 3 years ago, but is not ideal at all for today’s situation. For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on a way to take php completely out of the picture. I’ve devised and tested a setup that will allow gravatars to be served as static files from lighttpd at 5000 req/sec. This requires prerendering all gravatars, and as you can imaging, generating 800,000 images can take some time. I hope to have this new setup running as early as the beginning of next week. This will hopefully eliminate lag time for gravatars, and the world shall rejoice!

On the website side of things, I’m going to have to ask for your patience. I’ll have it rolled out just as soon as I can!

And don’t worry, Gravatar is NOT going to shut down.