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Addressing the on/off slow load times and related issues

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Clarity

Clarity

Will Bryant
Staff member
I've taken some of the Spring Drive money and charged Blair, our willing and able mercenary tech guru at the AZ colocation facility, with upgrading mySQL, PHP, Apache and the operating system. At the same time, he's going to check error logs and try to figure out where the problem is. Once that's complete, without regard to what he finds, I'm going to be sending over a bunch of information to JelSoft, the vBulletin developers, and they're going to analyze that, then offer solutions that might help us optimize the forum.

It could be something that's as easily fixed as changing the amount of space given to a particular drive partition, or upgrading one of the bits of software previously mentioned -- we'll know as soon as the delays stop.

I'll try to give some form of advanced notice before the site goes down for these upgrades, I don't yet know when they're going to happen. My hope is late this week or over the weekend. I imagine it won't take longer than an hour or so, during which the site is likely to be completely offline for at least part, and partially down for the rest.

Anyway, it's an issue that I'm aware of, and we are doing something about it. Certainly we can't enter the new season with load problems, and the hardware itself (barring a RAM failure, drive malfunction, etc.) isn't the issue. In terms of power, it's still entirely sufficient for the load we present it. A few years from now we may need to talk about putting the database load on one machine, and the web load on the other -- but we're a long ways off from needing to talk about that, imo.

As I have more info, I'll post accordingly.

Finally, starting July 1, we now pay for our colocation and bandwidth, albeit at a dramatically discounted rate. We finally got big enough that the free ride had to end. I suspect that the happy side effect of this will be that we'll also finally enjoy some level of "official" service and tech coverage.
 
We've had an offer recently to join a network of independent fan sites for the sake of advertising and income to cover expenses. Oddly, the contact for that came in just a couple weeks before the notice from our host that the free hosting/colocation couldn't continue.

However, while I appreciate the offer, and we (vrbryant, in particular) gave it some time and attention, I just don't want to waver from BP's non-commercialized philosophy. We're a grassroots community site, and straying from that runs contrary to our interests, in my opinion. Does the network in question mean straying from that? Perhaps not, but I know we don't stray if we're self-sufficient.

My belief is that we're self-sufficient, and will continue to be for some time if the price they've (the colocation/hosting company) set will be long-term fixed. So I'm doing everything I can to make sure that's the way the agreement is put together.

I'm probably understating all of that, but I want to be clear that everything is at least given due time and consideration, even if we go in effectively knowing we're not interested (as was the case here). The truth is, I'm opposed to ads of any form on the site, and militant/violently opposed to ever being subscription based. I also never want to answer to anyone but our own community in terms of content and acceptable standards. There are more than enough commercial OSU fan sites out there. Some successful, some ghost-town failures -- and that's not our arena either way, and never should be. Does that mean that there's no scenario out there that could see us a member of a larger community of independent-type sites like ours? No. Nor does it absolutely rule out any possibility. It just means that there's a certain ideology that goes with BP, and part of that is that it will never be a for-profit venture. Nor would I ever consider changing the model just to suit my personal needs. I create a sharp divide between BP and my personal travails/struggles, despite the shape of the Spring drive. We'll do what we need and can to stay online, grow and prosper, while staying within the relative confines of our own community standards. I know that's vague, but there will be no paradigm shifts in BP's approach and feel, even if we do consider and/or someday accept a role in some bigger picture.

Unfortunately, I've been a personal drain on the drive/donation system, which makes the timing of all of this unfortunate, but it's still manageable. I've simply redirected some drive money that's come in towards the upcoming administrative/tech work Blair is going to be doing, as well as covering a couple months ahead so that we're clear until the Fall, for starters.

It's not an easily defined issue. I suppose the simplest answer is something like; BP is going to remain BP, and we'll consider and discuss opportunities to be a better BP (while maintaining our grassroots/open-source-type approach) when and as they become available.

No, there are no plans to deviate from the donation model. If people feel we should consider alternatives to that, obviously we can talk about it.
 
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The server is being worked on as I type this, so it may go down for a few minutes here and there.

So far, there's no apparent cause for the slowdowns. But we're upgrading software, and rebooting the machine (which hasn't been done in 272 days, and there have been 20 kernel updates in that time).
 
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Okay, all the updates are done (I believe), so now the question is whether or not the slow (sometimes) pages are gone.

We'll see tomorrow. There's still more work to do, but somewhere along the line it has to be resolved, and I'm hoping for sooner rather than later.

For anyone curious, we're now running Fedora Core 5, Apache v2.2.0, PHP v5.1.2, and MySQL 5.0.18.
 
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Hmm, I'm getting some db errors.

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Seems to be some of the smaller, more obscure forums, still looking into it, but it's a known issue.

Site *seems* faster after the upgrades and reboot, but tomorrow will be the test. Still have more work to do with removing a couple hacks, upgrading a few others, etc.
 
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Every once and a while, I'll get one of those white screens that says something like...

"there has been an technical problem....the administrator has been notified."


Or something along those lines. It really only happens when I go onto the Administrative Forum. Sometimes I can refresh and it works, sometimes not.

As a matter of fact, when I attempted to post this message, it happened again.

There seems to have been a problem with the BuckeyePlanet Ohio State Forums database.
Please try again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, whom you can also contact if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience.
 
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Yes, and the slow load times are gone since the eStore isn't running right now.

I'm guessing the issue was all the extra lookups and cross references for every single account in a thread on BP with the eStore. For example, if you viewed page one of a two page thread, the server would have to lookup 15 subscriber profiles with gifts/awards, fetch the icons, and then load the page.

The slow load times never occured if you used the archive link at the bottom of the page, BTW.
 
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