gryphon strike Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 Sorry but I have not seen anything saying what is going on but I have been seeing a lot of crashes lately and in chat have heard a lot of complaints. So I am asking if it is possible to get an explanation as to what the trouble is and also if possible an explanation about what is being done about it. I really enjoy this board but if I cannot log on how can I enjoy it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Spidey Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 It's been down 3 times in last 24 hours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Linda Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 The recent crashes have been because we had to upgrade, which then needs rebuilding of the database. The board is so large that it keeps crashing when we do this. What we'll have to do is close it down for a long while, prune a bunch of posts, and then do the rebuild. The previous crashes have not been related to the board but to other things that run on the same machine, and nothing can be done about those from our end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 in other words, nothing can be done about the slow loading amazon ads, the frequent crashing, and so on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Linda Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 Short of a) getting amazon to fix their ads and getting a dedicated host? No. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edda van Heefmstra Ruston Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 Actually, what are the logistics of dedicated hosting? Obviously they've been decided against in the past, but why? Is it just the cost? Or even shared hosting but with round-the-clock support, to provide those kicks in the arse to the server as soon as they're needed? (Obviously this only applies to those other server problems, not the database rebuilds.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ran Posted January 25, 2008 Share Posted January 25, 2008 When we priced it last time, a board of our level of activity would (in the commerical world) be pointed towards dedicated hosting; as is, we have the lion's share of the server resources, so it's not really the server's performance that's at issue. It's largely issues with IPB and the fact that I've been tardy on keeping the forums pruned. Going beyond that, not being web/SQL/Linux experts (and not being around 24/7), we'd have to go with managed hosting to deal with the kind of problems we see now. The prices I've seen tend to start in the $270+ per month range. That's at least twice as much as we've ever raised for the forum in one year, I believe; it was when EzBoard was looking to cost us $2000+ that we were really looking to move. There are other issues with commercial hosts, such as the fact that the present situation does allow us a relatively fluid amount of room for collecting funds -- there is no precise schedule right now, that means we can take as long as we want to get funds raised. No need to beat the drums months in advance, basically. If it ever came to be that there was a fundraising shortfall of more than a couple hundred dollars (for a year's service), that'd be it for the forum. So we really think this is the best solution, and the only one Linda and I are comfortable with. As I said, to some degree the present errors are my own fault for not quite getting a handle on the maintenance process, and I'll be working to correct that. To touch on a different topic, the Amazon ads. We are going to dig a bit regarding the Amazon ads, and whether there's anything that can be done to mitigate the issue when Amazon's servers are swamped. If the code snippet we got was PHP, we could probably manage to get it to cut out trying to serve the Amazon ad if it took too long; we know just enough PHP for that. But the code is javascript, and there are certain limitations regarding what you can do in terms of changing it (in fact, technically, don't think we're allowed to change it at all -- but perhaps wrapping it within some other code, but leaving it otherwise untouched, might be within the terms). They have been a steady source of extra funds for the hosting needs of the site, so naturally we're not keen on just dropping them, especially when (as noted in the thread about this), there are things you can do client-side to make it a non-issue while it's happening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gryphon strike Posted January 25, 2008 Author Share Posted January 25, 2008 Thankyou I really apreciate the answer, both its complexity and its honesty. I currently have some time on my hands so if you want someone to help I am available but I know basically nothing about programming. So it would be more in the lines of pruning old threads that I could help with. Sorry to say but since I seem to be starting a new job in roughly 2 weeks it is a limited offer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ran Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Thanks for the offer, gryphon. Unfortunately, pruning is something that only I can do, for the most part. A brief update, but today I did the first of the shutdowns to start pruning the forum. Other than initial slowness in getting going (possibly because of some very large threads in the initial batch of pruned topics), it went along just fine. The board is now some 60k posts leaner. Tomorrow, next batch will be General Chatter, which will get pruned rather mercilessly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edda van Heefmstra Ruston Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Fair enough -- I had a feeling the $69/mo plans I'd seen ads for were not going to fit the needs of the board, but I didn't realise it was so much more expensive even than ezBoard. Glad to hear today's pruning went well. Will future ones be on a regular schedule? (i.e. we'll all just know that GC will be pruned the last Monday of the month, for example, or the entire board will be down for maintenance one full day every X weeks?) The impression I got from people's comments is that the real frustration came from the fact that each downtime was unexpected and we had no known ending, rather than that it was down at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ran Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Regular schedules and I aren't very cooperative, but I'll see what I can do regarding that. For the current round of pruning (noted in announcements), I'm going to aim between 1 and 3 PM CET for the outages while I try and get the job done. It will probably be a multi day job. After that, maybe on weekends around that time every couple of weeks... We'll see how this first batch goes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edda van Heefmstra Ruston Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Sweet. Thanks for the information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freudas Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 I don't understand the whole manual pruning thing, myself. Aren't there board settings that can make it so threads auto-delete after X amount of days (like, say a thread was not active in games for 30 or maybe 60 days, it would automatically get deleted unless it was a stickied post. Different forums could have a greater or shorter time limit depending on what it's contents are) or whatever? I know my old gaming clans board worked like that anyway, but it was a different host *shrugs* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ran Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Not built into IPB. I beleive there's a user-created plugin, but I'm wary of anything of that sort. If something goes wrong, there's no support for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xray the Enforcer Posted January 27, 2008 Share Posted January 27, 2008 Agreed -- gods, user-generated scripts is just asking for a stab to the jugular. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Filippa Eilhart Posted February 6, 2008 Share Posted February 6, 2008 is there any reason why Opera might be logging me off every day for the last week or so? IE doesn't do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ztemhead Posted February 9, 2008 Share Posted February 9, 2008 re: pruning. the BWB should step up and archive some old chestnuts IMO. Summering in Tadjikistan, Jack, Bill and Jen, the tale of snooging a Marride Man among others. It's six years gone, but I still check out the "If ASOIAF Were Written By Other Authors" every now and then. It's one of the most entertaining things I've ever read, though of course bordering on the streng verboten fanfic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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