Blogger, the provider of this service, has been behaving badly the last couple of weeks to the frustration of not just a few people, myself included. Many’s the time I’ve dashed off a pithy and witty piece of writing only to have it vanish with an electronic *pouf* like Wile E. Coyote at the bottom of a canyon. I’ve learned a few tricks, like copying the text and placing it in a text file or saving it as a draft, but a fat lot of good that does me when I can’t even access the control panel.

Blogger, in its inevitably chirpy style, has a Blogger Help page and a “known issues” column which seems to have been updated about the same time that John Kerry was making his move in the Iowa caucus. The status page now says that as of last Friday, “we’ve had a bout of stability problems with Blogger. Yesterday morning, users were encountering errors when trying to login and access their blogs.”

What causes this?

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.

Oh. I hate it when my queries are poorly optimized, don’t you? And they do feel our pain. Jason informs me “[a]s 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.” I feel better already.

If you want to see a really hissy take on this, check out Lambert’s screed over at Corrente.

Now let’s see if this will load…