Tonight the BRCA1 gene page will not load for me. I have tried repeatedly over the course of the evening and it fails every time, showing only the message “Unable to load gene.”
BRCA1 does appear in the search autocomplete, alongside BRCA1P1, so the gene is clearly still in the search index. It is the gene page itself that will not load.
What works: every other gene I have tried loads immediately, including TTN, which is far larger and far more variant-dense than BRCA1. BRCA1P1 also loads fine. So this does not look like a size or timeout issue.
I have also tested in an InPrivate window with no extensions and no VPN, and it still fails.
Separately, and possibly unrelated: the gnomAD browser as a whole has been very slow for me for the past week.
Environment: Microsoft Edge on Windows.
Can anyone else reproduce the BRCA1 problem? BRCA1 is one of the most heavily used genes in clinical variant interpretation, so it would be good to know whether this is affecting others.
Thanks for reporting this issue. We looked into BRCA1 specifically failing to load, and have resolved that now. Thanks for your patience on that front.
Essentially there was a very unlikely circumstance in which we would save a response that caused that “unable to load” into our cache, which would then cause that to be served to every further page load. We cleared the cache, which fixed BRCA1 failing to load, and just deployed a fix to the gnomAD browser that will prevent this from happening in the future.
Regarding the general slowness of the browser this past week, we hear you. We have noticed this ourselves, and and are looking into this now. Bot traffic has increased a lot over the last ~12+ months, which generally causes more load and strain on the browser. We’re working on this from a few angles, some more long term than others. That said, we’re going to take a look right now and try and help the slowness, I can post back in this thread later today.
Just chiming in to say, we’ve done some additional preventative measures to more aggressively rate limit traffic from some new bot sources. We’re continuing to try and improve performance in other ways.
Thanks so much for taking care of this and getting back to me. I don’t use my google email account much so just saw this. I did find that the BRCA1 page was working again though earlier. That helped solve a mystery in my results. SLiebman@unr.edu