You'd think as Xanga fades (membership, pageviews, time spent on site, etc.) that its server resources would be less strained and that performance would increase.  Apparently not.

A new social networking tracking site called DownOrNot tracks performance issues on twenty popular social networking sites (Xanga among them.)  Not all twenty are shown below, but the worst performing is - and that is Xanga - with only two green arrows up over the last week.

"To coincide with the launch of Social.DownorNot.com, WatchMouse monitored the availability and performance of 20 leading social networking websites during the period of August 1, 2010 to September 7, 2010. The results revealed that only Orkut recorded 100% uptime, followed closely by Flickr (99.99%), Del.icio.us (99.97%) and hi5 (99.93%). Facebook came in at 99.90% due to recent DNS issues, and Digg managed to land in the bottom five due to issues associated with their version 4 release the last week of August. More than one-third of the social networking sites monitored fell into the unacceptable category including MySpace (95.63%), followed by YouTube (95.93%), Classmates (96.98%), Digg (97.84%), StumbleUpon (97.99%), Foursquare (98.83%) and Xanga (98.88%) ."

  -WatchMouse Launches Social.DownOrNot

Again, Xanga is near the bottom.

“Young companies like Foursquare which have gained popularity and success quickly are likely to have growing pains such as site overload or breakage,” continued Pors. “More established websites however, such as MySpace and YouTube that are linked to larger organizations should not have any excuses.

Xanga should not have growing pains.  It should have shrinking gains.