stephen_speicher Posted December 25, 2004 Report Share Posted December 25, 2004 I am no longer receiving email updates to postings on threads I have participated in. The email updates stopped after the recent problems with the web site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stephen_speicher Posted December 25, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 25, 2004 I am no longer receiving email updates to postings on threads I have participated in. The email updates stopped after the recent problems with the web site. Hmm. I just got the latest one, but none prior. Was something just fixed in the site settings? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidV Posted December 25, 2004 Report Share Posted December 25, 2004 Sorry, my fault. It's been fixed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stephen_speicher Posted December 25, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 25, 2004 Sorry, my fault. It's been fixed. Yes, thanks. You sure have had your hands filled with site problems these past few days. I have thought of starting a board similar to this but I see that running it requires more than just a few trivial administrative tasks. Better off spending my time writing. Thanks to you and to those who have been helping behind the scenes in getting these problems resolved. Merry Christmas, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McGroarty Posted December 26, 2004 Report Share Posted December 26, 2004 Because I know I'd be wondering what's going on -- Objectivism Online moved from a powerful shared server to a much smaller system that's dedicated to Objectivism Online exclusively. The upsides are that there is more bandwidth and space available now, that GC has complete control of the server and can install whatever tools he likes, and that it's a cheap arrangement. The big downside has been the performance of the smaller server when there are bursts of heavy traffic. On a high-end shared server supporting hundreds of sites, sites can take turns gobbling spare resources when each has a burst of traffic. The small server has a lower fixed performance ceiling; when the site gets busy, there's no shared resource pool from which to borrow and everything's drawn to a halt. This means that we've had to go through a tuning phase. The process is that we observe what eats the most resources when the system isn't keeping up, make changes to lower the cost of those operations, then return to observing again. It's an iterative process. You don't see all the challenges up front and sometimes you're hit by a surprise like yesterday's crushing load when the wiki and blogs were brought over; we'd only worried that the forum would be a resource hog. But it's also a process where the surprises get progressively smaller. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stephen_speicher Posted December 26, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 26, 2004 Because I know I'd be wondering what's going on -- ... Thanks for the update. Based on what you said I can understand why, at times, the system would be slow, but what caused the many outages? There were many times when the site was not accessible at all. Was that because the system was being transferred, or something else? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McGroarty Posted December 26, 2004 Report Share Posted December 26, 2004 The first outage with the SQL error pages came when GC's old host changed something about the software they were running and neglected to tell him what was going on. I'm not clear on what happened there, but that's what precipitated the move. The blank pages and constant log-in problems on the new site were a result of a difference between the old site's script engine and that of the new site. The forum code relies on a trick that allows it to generate parts of the page out of order and rearrange them before sending. Neither of us had seen this before so it took some time to diagnose. The long outage yesterday morning came when GC brought the non-forum parts of the site online. We had both expected the forum to be the most resource hungry part of the site, but it turned out to be very minor compared to the rest. It took some time for us to isolate a part of the site that was holding onto all available server connections whenever a lot of requests were made of specific pages. The email alerts were down owing to a typo when activating some of the non-forum domains. This caused the mail server to silently fail. Apart from that, brief outages have come from taking the server down to bring non-forum parts of the site online, to move some parts of the site between servers, and to implement changes where performance bottlenecks were found. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stephen_speicher Posted December 26, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 26, 2004 The first outage with the SQL error pages came when GC's old host changed something about the software they were running and neglected to tell him what was going on. I'm not clear on what happened there, but that's what precipitated the move. The blank pages and constant log-in problems on the new site were a result of a difference between the old site's script engine and that of the new site. The forum code relies on a trick that allows it to generate parts of the page out of order and rearrange them before sending. Neither of us had seen this before so it took some time to diagnose. The long outage yesterday morning came when GC brought the non-forum parts of the site online. We had both expected the forum to be the most resource hungry part of the site, but it turned out to be very minor compared to the rest. It took some time for us to isolate a part of the site that was holding onto all available server connections whenever a lot of requests were made of specific pages. The email alerts were down owing to a typo when activating some of the non-forum domains. This caused the mail server to silently fail. Apart from that, brief outages have come from taking the server down to bring non-forum parts of the site online, to move some parts of the site between servers, and to implement changes where performance bottlenecks were found. "Invision Power Board, an award-winning scaleable bulletin board system, allows you to effortlessly build, manage and promote your online community. Advanced yet intuitive features like multi-moderation allow you to focus on developing your community, rather than wrestling with complex settings." Perhaps "effortlessly" is a bit overstated. Thanks again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidV Posted December 27, 2004 Report Share Posted December 27, 2004 Day to day management really is simple thanks to the great forum software. The challenge is making the right platform and configuration choices in the beginning and managing platform changes as the forum grows. The forum has seen two major version upgrades and four web server changes over two years with very minimal data loss. Many other online communities are either stifled by bad choices in the beginning, or fall victim to their own success. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AisA Posted January 18, 2005 Report Share Posted January 18, 2005 GC, I no longer receive e-mail alerts of replies. I have verified that the e-mail address in my profile is correct, and that the "Enable email notification of replies" box is checked. Am I doing something wrong, or has this feature been discontinued? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stephen_speicher Posted January 18, 2005 Author Report Share Posted January 18, 2005 GC, I no longer receive e-mail alerts of replies. I have verified that the e-mail address in my profile is correct, and that the "Enable email notification of replies" box is checked. Am I doing something wrong, or has this feature been discontinued? I am regularly receiving mine, so that feature must still be enabled. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AisA Posted January 19, 2005 Report Share Posted January 19, 2005 Oops. I found the problem. Never mind, GC.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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