Forum Downtime 2/11/2013 11:30pm - SUCCESS

digitalscream

Just a quick (and late) notice to all - we need a bit of an upgrade to the server to more gracefully handle the extra traffic we've been getting lately (Yay! We're popular!).

Shouldn't take long - around half an hour - but I'm afraid I really don't fancy waiting until everybody's in bed, so 11:30pm tonight it is.

Don't worry, though - unlike our previous home, this one has backups

Emp_Fab

What does the upgrade involve ?  Is it a cloud-based virtual type thing, or are we all actually connected to a box in your bedroom ? ;;)

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

What does the upgrade involve ?  Is it a cloud-based virtual type thing, or are we all actually connected to a box in your bedroom ? ;;)

It's all cloud-based hosting, using Linode. I'll run a snapshot backup first, then pay and kick off the upgrade process. If there's a failure at any point, I'll just wipe the upgraded virtual machine's disk and then restore the backup to it.

The upgrade will give us double the CPU priority and double the RAM. It also doubles the disk space, but we don't really need that at this point. 

Emp_Fab

That sounds very sexy.  Just out of curiosity, who's paying for all of this ?  Are we still running off the pot of initial donations ?  Do we need more monies ?

digitalscream

I'm paying for the most of the server - the kitty's putting in an extra £10/month. I wouldn't ordinarily be bothered about it, but the forum's using basically all the CPU and memory that the server's got at the moment, so the other sites I have on there aren't really getting much of a slice of the pie.

After the upgrade, I'll assign about 65% (1.3GB vs about 800MB now) of RAM to the forum and about 20% (400MB vs basically nothing now) to the other sites, which should be enough - the problem is that it's all dynamic at the moment, so the other sites get unloaded when the forum needs more. That means that the first page request after one of the other sites has been unloaded takes quite a while, which ain't good for my other customers

octatonic

We should do a fundraiser then.

Maybe we can offer some free advertising to some vendors in exchange for some prizes that people can pay for entries into a prize draw, with the winners being drawn at random?

TPDRI do one every year wit some amazing prizes- tickets are expensive at $25 USD but I always enter.

Maybe a smaller version of that would be good?

TTony

octatonic said:

We should do a fundraiser then.

Maybe we can offer some free advertising to some vendors in exchange for some prizes that people can pay for entries into a prize draw, with the winners being drawn at random?

TPDRI do one every year wit some amazing prizes- tickets are expensive at $25 USD but I always enter.

Maybe a smaller version of that would be good?

We already have plenty funds to cover the running costs for the next year or two.

I'm hoping, if we continue the current rate of growth and visibility/profile/credibility raising, that businesses will be approaching us soon, with requests to "get involved".  We've already had a couple, which we've kept at arm's length for now, in line with not wanting to get too close to advertisers just yet.  In due course we'll engage with them more formally (though still avoiding all the intrusive adforms that we all just block anyways).

Kebabkid

Thanks once again digitalscream to you and the other bods for all your hard work on getting this up and running and maintaining it.

Much appreciated!

digitalscream

octatonic said:

We should do a fundraiser then.

We already have - all the generous donations from members back at the start, and the T-shirts

The forum could basically be termed "self-sustaining" with respect to finances, but I'd rather continue donating a decent chunk of the hosting for as long as possible so that we're not forced into advertising; that's where the first poor decision is made for any website.

Kebabkid said:

Thanks once again digitalscream to you and the other bods for all your hard work on getting this up and running and maintaining it.

Much appreciated!

It's not just the admin team, mind - it's the mod team, too. Without them, this place would be overrun by spammers (who we do seem to get quite a few of; disproportionately so, given the fact that this place has only existed for a few months).

octatonic

digitalscream said:

 Without them, this place would be overrun by spammers (who we do seem to get quite a few of; disproportionately so, given the fact that this place has only existed for a few months).

Before we upgraded the forum software at Neck Diagrams forum (where I am a mod) we were getting 30+ spammers a day.

How many do we get here?

TTony

octatonic said:

Before we upgraded the forum software at Neck Diagrams forum (where I am a mod) we were getting 30+ spammers a day.

How many do we get here?

Not that many.  I'd guess it averages about 15-20 attempted signups per day nowadays.  I get most of them by looking at the new signups page a few times through the day, and killing them before they get membership (or fairly soon afterwards).  Some of them are too quick for that though, which is where the mod team come in. 

Luckily, the spam filter seems to flag a lot of them - and long may that continue.

octatonic

The spam filter gets a lot of them at ND too now.

The odd one gets through now and again.

digitalscream

Just a quick note - exactly 30 minutes of down time (god, I'm good), no data lost and everything functioning as expected.

Am I allowed a quick snigger now?

littlegreenman

Yep, I had just enough time to pootle over to a game I GM for and update a thing or two for my guild, grab another beer and it was back! Excellent work that man

Emp_Fab

Well done squire....  I just held my post in the clipboard just in case and pasted it into the upgraded forum shortly afterwards !

digitalscream

Bollocks. I just remembered...I forgot to clear out the log file (it's currently bigger than the entirety of the forum software and database).

One moment, please...

digitalscream

Right, errr...sorry about that, gents. All sorted. Perhaps an extra 10 seconds of downtime.

I retract my sniggering.

littlegreenman

I think an extra 10 seconds still allows you a snigger Lee. Beats 4 months worth of "last week..." into the proverbial cocked hat.

digitalscream

It kinda depends which hat I've got on. With my network/server tech hat on, I take downtime really seriously and hate even a few seconds.

If I'm being a developer, I really don't care and it's somebody else's problem until they can prove it's my fault

digitalscream

Side note: we've got some proper die-hards here, haven't we? Within a couple of minutes of the server coming back up, the "Who's online" list was back to 10 from nothing.

jd0272

I completely forgot about downtime. Had a 'where the fuck had it gone?' Moment.

Is it not worth having a dedicated PayPal account where us proles can randomly throw in the odd spontaneous amount for the upkeep of the site etc?

Just a thought.