29 replies to this topic

[Eyron I]

This site is so great in so many ways thanks to you putting so much effort and passion into it.

I'm glad to be able to contribute to this site and give a little something back to support your hard work. Thousands of people owe you so much for all the joy we get from it, for you making this site happen and keeping it running, and I hope many more will join in and make this fundraiser go through the roof

Thank you!

[naz]

Linda & Ran,
Your comments make sense, of course. I hope I wasn't coming off as a complainer (the board doesn't work! boo hoo!) when the truth is quite the opposite. Just reiterating that many of us - and I'm probably again overstepping my bounds by speaking for the board - would gladly contribute more to keep the board running smoothly. But yes, it makes sense to explore options that don't cost anything first.

[Linda]

naz,

No worries, we understand that people are just eager to get it working as well as possible. We're certainly very grateful for all the support and are very happy to see that the site means so much to so many.

[mor2]

Linda, on 12 May 2012 - 05:42 AM, said:

We are also looking at a caching system called Varnish which may help further reduce memory usage. It has been praised a lot but it is also quite fiddly to configure correctly.

That sounds great and with that additional memory you mentioned varnish can really keep the system responsive during high load and peak situations. Plus iirc it's free, free as a beer (or whatever that phrase is that our IT guys like to say so much) and supported by mediawiki.

Edit: Wow almost 125%

Edited by mor2, 13 May 2012 - 04:40 PM.

[Ran]

I admit, the Mediawiki install instructions are much more complicated than what I've seen for other things! We're going to stay modest and see how Varnish works with the forum first before we try to wrap our heads around how to get it working with Mediawiki.

[Sparks]

After talking to Ran a bit about things the other night, I've been experimenting with Vanish on a little test site, but we're not going to try putting it in place on the server until *after* the episode tonight.  After last night's fun little adventure with the caching PHP engine blowing up (in a very creative way), we don't want to introduce too many changes during the immediately-after-the-episode traffic.  Probably Tuesday or Wednesday, I'll take the board down briefly for a bit to set up Vanish and see if it increases performance.

In general, the performance under the new setup has been really good as it is, especially compared to the old and much more standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack we had been using.  The problem is just that the new setup is so complicated that if one thing goes wrong, well, we saw what happened last night.  So introducing one more element to the formula right during the heaviest load is, uh, let's just go with "probably unwise."

As an illustration, last night's fun adventure was caused by malformed requests to the wiki by some bot... the malformed requests caused PHP-FPM to spit out errors so rapidly that it was generating gigabytes of logfiles.  And PHP-FPM will go into a weird error state if its error log is over 2GB, where it simply silently errors out on three out of every four requests or so.  That was... fun.  An upgrade to our PHP-FPM setup got us a patch that fixed the initial issue, and blowing away the enormous amount of random error logs that PHP-FPM had vomited all over the system fixed the rest, but tracking the issue down was an exercise in forensic system administration.

Edited by Sparks, 13 May 2012 - 07:52 PM.

[kissdbyfire]

As so many others have already said, this site is amazing. I have spent so much time here, I have learned so much... And last but not least, I've made great friends here. Maybe you should run a fundraiser at least twice a year, or at some other regular interval. I know I'd be more than happy to chip in, and I'm sure many, many others would too.

Cheers!

[Greywolf2375]

I put this in another thread as well, but is there a way to contribute that is not Paypal connected?  I've had my ID stolen via Paypal twice before so it's not a service I use anymore.

[A Menina Cebola]

Wish the fundraiser was still on. Got paid today.

[Ran]

There is always next year. Though if you really want to donate now, feel free to PM me and I'll direct you to the appropriate Paypal address.