[Closed] Forum Maintenance.

Cheers Tom keep up the good work.

dim problem I wish you luck in sorting it out

We're experiencing some continued forum problems

I hadn't noticed. Honest.

Good efforts as usual Tom!

Noooo keep it broken. I got so much more work done this morning. 🙂

Not a critisism, but a suggestion.

Perhaps while you are doing things with the website and specifically the forum. Might you consider opening up the time window for forum posters to edit their posts, so that people can still get back to their post and edit, once the website / forum is up and running again ?.

Some people posted last night and then couldn't correct posts.
We all make mistakes, leave words out by accident, etc.

Just a thought.

🙂

Whilst you're opening up time windows, can you open one back to 1987?

Hi Tom great work wicked web site! Is there any way you can make the movies work on the i phone / I Pad? It's one of the reasons I won't go digital with my sub as I'm not 100% it will work, on the apple mobile systems. but the movies not working is a real same week in week out. Sorting it will be a real winner please fella!

Thanks!

Hi Tom great work wicked web site! Is there any way you can make the movies work on the i phone / I Pad? It's one of the reasons I won't go digital with my sub as I'm not 100% it will work, on the apple mobile systems. but the movies not working is a real same week in week out. Sorting it will be a real winner please fella!

Thanks!

Unless he has a direct line to Steve jobs to tell him to get his head out of his ass and allow flash on you poor iphone/ipad users kit, I doubt it.

but Apple have decided the future is HTML 5 and not flash.

but Apple have decided the future is HTML 5 and not flash.

Yeah lets see how that works out, used to be a total apple fanboy, just find their kit uninspiring and bland these days.

Hi breakneck The thing is the Vids can be seen some times and on vimeo, last weeks could all be seen just not this weeks! I asked on the forum and the thought was it may be how they are embedded? So it's not a flash for apple question. (although if you could sort that out too while you have five min spare at lunch time Tom that would be great!!!)

Thanks for the info Wookster my mistake 😉

Have you guys considered using a staging server?

It's just gone funny again for the last hour or so. This seems to happen every couple of days. The instability has been noticeable the last month or two I'd say.

3..2...1.. and we're back in the room! can't you fix when I'm out on my bike? ta 😉

Thanks for your hard work, chaps.

here's a promise:

i'll be only too happy to buy an on-line premier subscription thingy if you can get the website working...

(it's still a bit shonky)

Nice offer but I reckon would need a bit more information than it's a bit wonky. I don't seem to have any problems.

Is the forum fully fixed or not? I'm having lots of problems refreshing pages and don't know if it's the forum or my computer/internet connection. 😥

don simon - Member
Is the forum fully fixed or not? I'm having lots of problems refreshing pages and don't know if it's the forum or my computer/internet connection.

That'll be "not" then.

What's going on. Is the maintenance finished?

I keep getting site not available messages.

Yeah I'm getting the same messages. Last night was down for an hour and just now for a bit - not sure if its just me?!?

Good luck Tom in getting things sorted!

Are you going to do anything about the amazon banner issue?

What Amazon banner issue?

When viewing on android, touching any part of of the page that is not bang on the hyperlink, takes you into amazon site. It's bloody annoying as it does it even when scrolling.

Only does it when the amazon banner is at the top

Ah. Being a Premier subscriber, I never see that banner.

I've altered a few settings on the Amazon ads. There's nothing obviously wrong as far as I can see but clearly there's a bug of some kind that manifests on Android phones. Can anyone confirm if it's still doing it?

i find a big hammer and gas axe sorts most problems out ,anyone want me to fettle there bikes 😆

why is it so shonkyworld at the moment?

can we have a shonkytrackworld T-shirt?

i'm serious.

with a couple of tired hamsters on it or something...

please?

The server was due to have some hardware test on it some point soon, that may have been why it has been down earlier this am.

On the plus side I've got loads of work done 🙄

[i]can we have a shonkytrackworld T-shirt?[/i]
I prefer shonkytronkworld myself, but put me down for a t-shirt whichever variation is used.

Hello everyone. This is still a fluid situation but here's an update.

First some clarifications. I know this has caused some irrelevant confusion before. There are two Toms doing different stuff on this website. Most of my time should be spent on our other technical operations, while most of the stuff you see around you is Tom dB. Usually you can just say 'Tom' and at least we will know who you're referring to.

Second thing, the uptime has been a matter of some debate. Prior to 4 January this year we had 100.0% uptime on the 'new' forum software, I think. There was briefly some shonky table locking going on with the searches, but we innovated a solution to that quite a while ago and it never caused any serious problems. Since 4 January, when there was a sudden and unexpected crash, we've had some intermittent downtime. There have been a lot more continuous days of uptime than days with downtime since - I'm not saying it's currently good, but I suppose saying that I thought I had fixed it several times. Obviously there's an ongoing issue. The crashes happen mainly, but not exclusively, when the server's under load. If it happened regularly or predictably my job would be so much easier.

I posted the other day that we were waiting for our hosting provider to investigate a hardware issue. They have since investigated, and yesterday fixed, one particular problem. We are monitoring that situation further - I had hoped that would be the end of it.

However there is evidently another problem with the server. For those who know about such things, i/o is showing itself to have some sort of unbearable load. There's now a number of solutions I'm looking at implementing forthwith - one involves "archiving" some of the posts in the forum, another is to move to another server - not itself a trivial task. That won't be today. We are also in the process of offloading other load to yet another server.

So there you are. This is doing my nut in more than anyone else's. I've investigated a hundred possible bottlenecks this month, worked more hours than not, and I'm now narrowing in on a lasting solution. Sleep depending, I'll possibly arrange something for later today.

Is porting to other forum software not an option?

Is porting to other forum software not an option?

He's mentioned up there it's probably a hardware problem, so porting won't fix that.

He's mentioned up there it's probably a hardware problem, so porting won't fix that.

Software changes [i]can[/i] help to reduce load, which in turn can stop servers going bang.

The Toms have the data if it was software I'm sure they'd look at something else.

Software changes can help to reduce load, which in turn can stop servers going bang.

Exactly. You're the largest client on BBPress which is not a nice place to be!

Be a small guy on some of the software designed for the big guys!

The Toms have the data if it was software I'm sure they'd look at something else.

They may have the data. The data may say a software change is needed. The thing is tweaking the existing code is far far less time consuming/cheaper than migrating to a new software platform, so I imagine, and rightly so, they are going to try everything they can with the current setup.

What Jamie said 🙂

Thanks for the update Tom(NondB).

here's now a number of solutions I'm looking at implementing forthwith - one involves "archiving" some of the posts in the forum

This makes a lot of sense and would avoid the occasional 2 year old zombie thread that sometime pops up. Maybe archive them as "read only" after 6 months? I guess then you could have them as static pages and get the off the DB or at least just move them to different tables.

On the rare occasion that someone wants to discuss some ancient thread they can always start a new thread with a link to the archived one.

Tom, I've said it on these threads before. If you have an i/o problem due to high load on the database you really should investigate the use of memcache. This is how Facebook handle huge loads. It does need some software tinkeration to ensure you only cache certain queries, but the benefits are huge.