ActorAgeCheck has had a minor update to improve performance and prevent downtime in certain conditions.

The image server has been slightly modified to prevent resource hogging in the event that the image database is failing to return image data timely. The site experienced an issue with its image database today which resulted in website timeouts or severe slowdowns (e.g. in some cases taking 30 seconds or longer to load a page).

I have made some improvements to the image system to fail gracefully in the event that our image database is not returning images in a timely manner.

This change will have no user-facing impact except in times of technical difficulties with a moving part of the site. If the image server fails to return images in a timely manner, it will no longer cause an overall site slowdown or timeout during times of heavy traffic.