Current schedule

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[admin (no pm's please)]

More than 150 forums have been moved with a little emphasis on moving active forums, and whilst the nameserver update is still pretty slow, the support forums do not seem crowded with people saying their forum has blown up

There is an inherent lag in a system that first gets told of a new address, then every 15 minutes reloads the main nameserver, with the secondary reloading hourly, and the world slowly catching on as caches elsewhere on the net expire. But I think the lag is harmless enough, and there is far more danger associated with overloading these servers.

The rest of the week is likely to be spent on more backend work, polishing this new system, sending out notices to inactive forums, and writing a long overdue management system so that people paying for advert free are properly listed.

At that point we can get back to what the forum owners want to see done
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Not withstanding the very annoying outage last night, which hopefully we have ensured will not happen again the work on the backend system that has been ongoing for rather more than a month has now pretty much concluded
well at least until the next phase!

At any rate this does now free the schedule to start putting in more of the hack requests from the "on the list" forum

I aim to start with one or two of these tomorrow. As ever despite having the time now to do these the biggest issue is stability of the system, so it is not going to be "a hack a day" but it will be faster than the last month.
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[admin (no pm's please)]

The best laid plans always go out of the window

I got one new feature into the system yesterday, the quite involved one of improvements to the template editor.

But by the evening it was clear we were hitting a few speed issues and this morning the records suggest Friday was almost 10% busier than the previously most busy day Which is all good but suddenly made the new server order vaguely schedule for "a few" weeks time, a matter of urgency.

Today aside from (with the help of SGTS) sorting a few things in preperation of the new server, I have moved a score of active forums to the less loaded server which will buy us a few days until the new server is actively on line.

At this point there will be a novel change to the way we operate, which might well be blindingly obvious already
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Still waiting for the new server to come online. Hence we have had a new hack put in place today, and the office is tidier than it has been in years

One useful bit of good news is that in some of the "waiting time" I have finally managed to find a way of resolving an occasional server issue that has previously required a reboot. This solution should enable us to more confidentally try different configurations for better speed

On which subject more forums have been move to a different server which is helping with speed issues, but the key had to be getting the new server going.
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[admin (no pm's please)]

We just hit a chrunch slowdown just now

Which also happened yesterday at the peak time. You get the syndrome where people start hitting refresh as the speed is slow, which only makes matter worse

It is pretty annoying to have been caught a little on the hop by the sudden increases in popularity. It is also notable how new forums are still pouring onto the system despite it not being advertised anymore!

I started at 6am this morning commisioning the new server, and following some considerable hiccups, it is now online and accepting new forums. Subject to a little more testing it can also start accepting current forums, allowing us to take the strain off the main server.

Given we were already taking forums off the main server (several active ones were moved only this morning) it does look like a bit of a race against time. I don't want to move forums casually and wholesale. As such it may take several days for speed to really get back to very good
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[Viper]

What time is peak time?

[admin (no pm's please)]

[admin (no pm's please)]

With the new server things seem to be buzzing along at top speed again

But new server does also equate to some more back end work before more visible improvements can occur.

Backup tests and general server configuration are needed. It is notable that the new server is screamingly fast at the moment even though it has not been configured properly yet
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[admin (no pm's please)]

As stated in the previous post today and for that matter tomorrow are about letting things settle in, deal with issues, and generally taking stock of where we are load wise.

I can't put a precise figure on things at the moment, but maybe 20% load has been taken off the main server, enough one would hope to take it out of crisis territory which is the most important thing. But when we have reviewed things a bit more, some more load will be taken off the main server onto "trillian".
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[admin (no pm's please)]

The new server has been eased up to about 33% of the load of the main server, which is about 60% of the load of the secondary server.

Over the next week, I hope we can create an approximately equal load on both, which will lay the basis for some accurate experiments in performance optimisation
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[Mike]

Has www.swapitshop.myfreeforum.org been added to the new fast one? It is 8th in the forum dictionary

[admin (no pm's please)]

No it hasn't and there is no intention to shift it.

Remember we want all servers to be equally fast, for various circumstantial reasons, we let things get a bit slow in the server you are on. Though seriously if you think was poor here, then you have not suffered what other service do!

It now seems fast again here, and whilst it is faster on the new server that is only for a while as we balance the load. This in a nutshell is easier if we move smaller forums than yours, but remember each forum we move, makes your server faster, and the fast one a tad slower!
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Have been testing the system that transfers forums on a very large forum and found as suspected that there is such a thing as too big to transfer automatically to a new server.

On a certain level this does not matter, as all servers will be kept to speed, and there is no reason what so ever to tempt fate by transferring a forum with 38,000 posts

Tomorrow I will however try and find what a safe upperbound is, testing had been done on forums somewhat under the 10,000 level and this represents by far the most relevent range.
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Didn't actually get a chance to pursue the large forum transfer issue today, some interesting ideas cropped up in the area of optimising the servers, and it seemed like a good idea to check things out.

The upshot was only a minor change to configuration. But every little counts

The good news for the members is that things do seem have settled down again after the introduction of the new server, and after checking out fourms transfers the plan tomorrow is to take a look at "on the list" and get something new installed
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[admin (no pm's please)]

Have established that a forum of 18,000 posts can be easily transferred

Hardly a matter of urgency, but handy to know.

Took a long look at the suggest table BBcode hack this morning, and it hit the "off the list" bin.

meanwhile, whilst it should be nothing to have undue concern about, we have discovered some configuration issues on the new server
I anticpate taking the rest of the week evaluating the configuration, with the idea of making changes Saturday morning. There will be a little down time as a result. But this is pretty important to resolve.

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