CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

Sorry about the website slowness and sporadic down-time this morning. For some reason, Friday likes to give us the most fits. Almost every time we run into any issues it happens on a Friday. Go figure…

Anyhow… In case other web developers run into this issue, here is what happened, and what we did to fix it.

This morning we noticed that w3wp.exe on our web server was using nearly 100% of the CPU and was floating between 3GB and 6GB of memory usage.

Restarting IIS didn’t solve the problem. w3wp.exe would quickly consume all available resources.

Solution: Re-deploy the ASP.Net 2.0 website.

My theory is that the ASP.Net compile state somehow got corrupted. Re-deploying the website simply triggered a full recompile.

The website is back up and running smoothly now.

When you create an account at CheckOutMyCards.com our server sends you an email. Sometimes email from our server gets blocked by your email provider. The easiest way to unblock our email is to add staff@checkoutmycards.com to your contact list. To do that with Yahoo! Mail simply click on the Contacts tab or go to http://address.mail.yahoo.com.

Then click the Add Contact button.

Specify staff@checkoutmycards.com as the email address and click Save.

Now email from our server will arrive in your inbox and you will be able to activate your account.

To request a new activation email go to the following page, sign in (if necessary), and click the ‘Request a new activation email’ link.
http://www.checkoutmycards.com/manage/activate.aspx

Background
As part of the account creation process at CheckOutMyCards.com we verify that the user has specified a valid email address that can successfully receive email from our servers. This is very important for sellers on our site because they need to be notified if a potential buyer sends them an offer on their cards.

Unfortunately many people have trouble receiving email from our servers. In the past 30 days most email domains have had a 65-75% success rate in receiving our emails and activating their accounts. However there are two outliers, @yahoo.com and @gmail.com. As we have seen with just about everything from Google, their services appear to be superior. 95.74% of the users from @gmail.com successfully activate their accounts. Even though Yahoo! Mail is the post popular email provider it appears to be on the other end of the spectrum. Only 47% of the @yahoo.com email addresses are able to receive our emails.