I see that Jeff Shaw is dealing with a writer's slump over on USS Mariner. I know the feeling. I've been in a bit of a programming slump lately.

Usually, though, when I'm a programming slump, it's because there's some problem that I haven't solved. I find it hard to get myself to write any code when there's a chance that this nagging problem may alter the solution.

The nagging problem in this case has been the CPU load, which has been higher than I'd like from time to time. The software won't scale to higher traffic levels unless I can get the CPU loads down.

But it was a difficult problem to debug because it wouldn't happen often enough for me to capture. But yesterday, thanks to an incoming link from sportsillustrated.com, I was able to see the behavior in action, and figure out the problem.

I tested out a little tweak to the caching system, and the CPU load dropped considerably. The fix was a bit kludgy though, so I'm gonna have to go back and do a more elegant solution.

But at least that little problem that was slowing me down is out of the way. Hopefully, I can bust out of my slump now and start hitting again.