You may have noticed that Boosterrific.com has been taking its own sweet time loading in recent weeks. I have the data to prove that this sluggishness has been affecting the site traffic. Hopefully, I'm only scaring away bots, and not Booster loyalists.

Since January 1, server response time has been frequently slow, with the homepage taking anywhere between 3 (good) and 20 seconds (very bad) or longer (very, very bad) to load.

To combat the problem, I've re-written the code rendering the pages and re-indexed the database. The server host has updated both the processing engine and the database server. By every internal benchmark, Boosterrific.com should be running faster than ever.

All our work has uncovered a new problem with the server that may or may not be faulty RAM. (I've checked, and it's certainly not the alluvial dampers.) So once again, I'm asking you to be patient with me and the site while we continue to investigate.

I'm still chronicling the problem, so I implore you, if you notice the site acting unusually sluggishly or erratically, please let me know. Either in the Boosterrific Forum (assuming that it is responding) or via email at webmaster at boosterrific dot com.

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Earlier this week, I warned visitors to the Forum that the server host for Boosterrific.com was planning on upgrading some defenses that would hopefully stop a plague of invalid server requests that were growing to the level of a denial-of-service attack.

As a side effect of this server maintenance, it is highly likely that Boosterrific.com will experience some significant downtime today. It seems like I say this a lot, but I apologize in advance for the disruption in service.

Hopefully we'll be back tomorrow, stronger than ever.

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Sigh. I forgot to plug the vote counter back in when I revised the scripts last week, so, yeah, last week's poll... it recorded no votes for the first 5 days it was up. I think I'm going to have to run this one again later.

Last week's poll question: Which Booster Gold supporting character do you miss the most in the DCnU? (8 votes)

Yeah, I'll be running that one again soon [wipes egg from face]. Let's move on, shall we?

Justice League of America #1 has 53 covers. This has attracted the attention of various localized media outlets which seem pleased to find their respective state flags on the cover of a comic book. I'm pretty sure that was DC's goal. Does that publicity turn into sales? Out of curiosity, I ask:

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First things first: my apologies that the Boosterrific Forum was down all weekend. It wasn't supposed to be. I took it down for testing late last week, and then my internet went out most of the weekend.

This disruption in service probably didn't bother many of you, but I'm sure that someone tried to drop by and let us know that DC has announced that Booster Gold will be making a feature appearance in May's Smallville Season 11 #13.

SMALLVILLE SEASON 13
Written by BRYAN Q. MILLER
Art by DANIEL HDR
Cover by PETE WOODS
On sale May 8 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
• An all-new episode begins with "Argo" part 1 of 3! Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes try to stop war between Earth and a shocking enemy! Plus, a glitch in Booster Gold's Legion flight ring propels the "Gold Standard," his trusty robot Skeets and The Man of Steel into the 31st century.

That was some good news I'm sure that we all would have liked to seen last week, yes? (This solicitation was originally posted on IGN.com. As per DC's recent trend of teasing solicitations across the web before releasing them on their own website, you can expect to find this solicitation on DCcomics.com/blog later this week.)

Smallville is one of DC's "digital first" titles, meaning that we probably don't have to wait until May 8 to see Booster return to action in the Smallville (television) Universe. The books are released in three parts over the course of three weeks at 99¢ each before being collected in a print version. Therefore we can expect to start reading this story online on April 12, if we're impatient for more Booster Gold. I know I am.

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For the past three years, I've been keeping record of raw page requests from the Boosterrific.com server. (You'll note a break in the graph around Oct 2012; that was when the forum was being remotely spammed by bots. I have therefore eliminated that data.)

The high water mark was November 2011. The coming of the New 52 sure did generate a lot of buzz, didn't it?

This second graph is what Google says the Boosterrific.com page hits are. Google only tracks hits that activate the embedded Javascript code, so it completely ignores hits from bots and spiders, some mobile devices, and any pages which do have not the Google Analytics code embedded (which includes some of the deeper pages in the site, including the house ads and some forum pages). The numbers from Google are, understandably, considerably lower.

What a big difference automated spiders make! Note that so far as Google is concerned, the apex was in Spring 2011, when the coming of the New 52 was announced. So as the humans departed, robots took over? That sounds about right.

Many thanks to everyone who has visited the site in the past 3 years, especially those of you with eyeballs and fingers.

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