Lookery.com

We have seen apps hanging for ourselves. Others see it, and it is a big concern. We did a bit of research and found this article that would be a worthwhile read for all Facebook app developers.

Two of the main points that we saw were:

6) A lot of my errors stemmed from poorly-formed html / fbml - forgetting to close p tags, etc. Things that a normal browser wouldn’t complain about will cause the Facebook parser to error out. Note, as the application developer, these errors will show up on your page. However, if you’re working on a project with someone else, and you aren’t the creator of the app, this output may not necessarily show.

7) Have some issues with how your fbml/html renders? Having problems laying something out just right? Use a tool like Firebug and/or Web Developer (both Firefox extensions) to help you examine the source. You can see how Facebook is styling your elements, what Facebook classes you can use in your own styling, etc. One example I ran into - trying to create a checkbox within an fb:editor form caused all sorts of sizing and layout issues. Looking at the css, Facebook had assigned a “width:100%” to the input tag. I overwrote this with a “style=width:auto;” and everything worked fine.

We wanted to share this information, as many people look towards the ad network when things start to slow down. Right now, we are seeing very acceptable load on our servers. Our biggest publisher is currently making over a million requests per day. Lookery ads are popping just fine on all their apps.

It was our problem for a while, but no longer. We addressed this issue as soon as we could. Now that we are on Amazon EC2, we can and will throw more servers and more bandwidth at the problem just by dropping a dime.