Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I’ve almost got the new Genealogy Software Review site ready. I spent the weekend entering data, information about over 100 genealogy programs from my Genealogy Software Links page. I’ve still got a couple of hundred foreign-language programs, online programs and utilities to enter and then its done.

But I was having too much fun. As I added each program, I went back to that program’s website and checked it out in some detail. For many of the programs, I hadn’t done that in years, just validating the links and not much more. It’s interesting how so many programs don’t really change over time. Maybe a new version comes along, but they are generally as I remember them many years ago. It’s like that friend you hadn’t seen since Grade 4. He’s grown older, but you can still recognize him by his looks and personality.

Then I realized that I should also include some defunct programs in the review site. There are many people still using them and there are some good things they might have that other programs don’t. So far I’ve included 17 of them, but there will be more. I’d prefer the word “defunct” but I ended up using “unsupported” just because it alphabeticaly ended up at the end of the list of License types.

For those unsupported programs, I tried to write up a bit of their history. I did the research and then thought back. Do you remember ROOTS by CommSoft? It was quite an advanced program for its time in the 1980’s. I would have loved to have it, but I didn’t even have my first PC yet and those were over $2000 at the time plus several hundred dollars for ROOTS. Couldn’t justify it back then.

Well ROOTS ended up being bought by Palladium Interactive, who turned it into Ultimate Family Tree, possibly the most comprehensive program ever developed (with The Master Genealogist now at its level). By then, I was using Reunion for Windows, which then sold their Windows version to Sierra On-Line who renamed it Generations. I was a beta tester for one of the early versions of Generations back in 1998. Then there was another program named Family Origins, which was the original effort of Bruce Buzbee who now has RootsMagic.

Ultimate Family Tree, Family Origins and Generations were among the best and most popular programs at the time. But the number one program in sales was Family Tree Maker, and it was not at that time considered to be in the same class as the other three.

So what happened? Genealogy.com, the parent company of Family Tree Maker bought out all three programs. For a couple of years, they did continue to sell them as well, but it did not take long before they were dropped, leaving Family Tree Maker in a fairly dominant spot. Recently, Family Tree Maker has gone through major changes and improvements, but there is still a gap where the other three used to be. Many useful and interesting ideas have been lost.

It will be interesting to see how many people fill out reviews for the “unsupported” programs, and especially how UFT, Family Origins and Generations are rated in comparison to Family Tree Maker.

About 10 minutes ago, my site slowed to a crawl - all pages, not just the Blog and Forum.

I went into a live chat with IXWebhosting support. To my amazement, their Admins did something (would not tell me what) and bango, the site was fast again. It took less than 10 seconds, so it wasn’t a server restart. I have no idea what it was.

So maybe, just maybe, things will be okay again for awhile. IX’s support has been good and they have so far fixed problems. But this is shared hosting, and I do expect future events like this.

No sooner than I think everything’s going smoothly, after I finished up my post last night, I discovered that the Blog and Forum were bogging down again.

One second response or less to display a webpage should be the norm. Two seconds should be the worst-case maximum. Four is too long. 10 is unbearable and indicative of a problem.

I never did find out the reason for the last slowdown that I talked about in my June 5th post, but it is happening again. Displaying the blog or forum has had a significant number of “too long” and “unbearable response” times up to 60 seconds.

I’m investigating and hope to have a solution soon. I see that the mySQL server they have me on gets over 1000 requests a second! That’s a lot, but normally the server handles it. It could be that they have some sites that occasionally get a popular link and thousands of hits come over short time periods and the database server overloads. But I don’t know yet.

In any case, the rest of the site works fine and is fast enough, so not all is bad.