What's up with the site today?
As I'm sure you've noticed the uptime for the site today was more or less on and off, rather than steadily up. The main reason behind the uptime and the frequent display of the "Under maintenance" error is due to some unforseen performance issues with the back-end code to facilitate interfacing with Xbox Live's gamercard and presence information via the XCDP feed. As a result of this, I've been doing tweaks to code and caching configurations all day and running performance counters among some other tracing tools to try and isolate the source of the problem.
It turns out the underlying cause of the problem was due to the way Visual Studio sets up the code when dealing with tables containing relationships within a DataSet designed with the DataSet designer. Even if I'm not using the methods Visual Studio creates for me to get the data in a related row the code still gets the row. Normally this wouldn't be a problem; however, the data retreived in this way is not ever cached meaning that upon every request for a particular gamertag's presence or their played games caused the intended request I wrote within the code and then the code that is part of the DataSet to request the same rows. Normally I only request five rows since that is the number present within a gamercard, but this dataset would request every single row.
Anyway the problem is fixed now, and games will soon be back in gamercards. Thanks for being patient even during the slowness.