Postage Stamp Chat Board & Stamp Bulletin Board Forum
 

"Byte" - our USA based web host in Tulsa just advised me -

We need to take a maintenance window tonight beginning at 12am CDT. We expect the actual outage to be somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour.

That occurs roughly 3 hours from the time I make this post.

He is upgrading to even larger and more secure servers, and apologies in advance for this short interruption.

Glen

Well that was pretty painless!

Apart from the withdrawals it was

Didn't even notice

Glen, your original post about the outage "about to happen" shows up (at least in my board set-up) as: Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:53 pm.

Your post about that "being pretty painless" shows up at: Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:58 pm

Have you and Byte finally discovered Time Travel???

John A

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Armstrong'sStamps**http://www.armstrongsstamps.ca
Knowledge is Key.....Libraries work!

Posted to members 3 hours in advance of outage.

Approx one hour outage.

Posted a couple of hours later that it was hardly an issue.

We try to keep them quick.. We took another quick outage this morning to migrate the database to a much faster database server as well.

As for time travel, I am still working on that one.. but.. if you went to the Arctic circle and flew east at mach 6, would you not be going back in time..

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Anyone notice if the board feels faster since Sunday?

Byte: It does seem faster for me, i.e. images come up faster than before.

I would have to agree with Erik.

I used to scroll down a page and have blank spots where pictures had not yet loaded. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.

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-------kriszick
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

Byte ... I loaded up an old album for sale yesterday, that had many dozens of images in post 1 - 130 of them in fact -

http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=31409

Such things really are an acid test as to how fast things are - both at your server end, and how fast my computer processes them as well this end.

Normally I would load them into 2 posts, but as a test of server speed did it in one to see how it coped.

My gut feeling was they loaded faster than usual - so, many thanks!

That is a lot of processing going on there. Still takes time, but I was impressed at how quickly they loaded.

Apologies for anyone on dial-up as they will take a week, but as so few folks are in that boat these days, thought it was worth a test.

Glen

I just picked on the last full page of the Engraved beauties thread and it loaded very quickly indeed. I cannot be sure if it was faster or not but it was not slow. That page had 79 images and at least half would have been between 200,000 and 300,000 bytes.

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Here to learn
Here to enjoy

It is definitely faster. Previously, I would have had to wait at least 30 seconds to a minute for that many pictures to come up. They came up instantly. Nice!!! Good job Byte

edited to add: In reference to Glen's link in the sales thread!

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-------kriszick
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

Glad to hear things are running a bit faster. There is still 1 more thing I am doing on the backside for the board that will be coming in the future. It should yield a bit more responsiveness as well (and improve the disaster recovery options even more).

I really don't think you should be referring to the Volunteer Moderator Team as "the backside of the board"

As a long time enterprise data center guy... I can assure you he is not talking about the volunteer administrators.

He's talking about the database server or an application server or a storage appliance, (which might well be row BB, Aisle 147), which talks to the firewall, (possibly in row ZA, aisle 099), which talks to the web server, (frontside of the board... way over somewhere else in the data center)

The entire installation would look like a couple of football fields of gray, black or beige, 8 foot cabinets all lined up in rows.

Each of these servers is probably one slim shelf in one of these cabinets, (assuming they aren't virtual), about the size of a large pizza box.

Anyway... he's not talking about the moderators.... trust me.

Tulsa... this wouldn't be an EDS / HPES site by any chance?

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"Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
G. K. Chesterton

Byte said: There is still 1 more thing I am doing on the backside for the board that will be coming in the future.

Is that happening tonight. The board seems to be powered by snails. Pages are taking 5 minutes to load.

I have restarted my computer, checked the line speed, checked other pages and all seem to be working fine.

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We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Paul, no problems on my 'puter with pages loading etc.

Could be your ISP is slightly busy

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Tony

Thanks, RobRoy - I was just kidding there. I am one of the aforementioned team, and was having a bit of an "in joke" based on the other meaning of the work "backside" - in UK that is a colloquial term for the human, erm, derriere; sorry if it was "lost in translation"

Interesting that you mention EDS / HPES - do you work for them by any chance

They are a major customer and I've spent a lot of time in several of their installations, at least virtually.

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"Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
G. K. Chesterton

As far as I know our web-hoster Byte is the big cheese, of his own busy operation.

Luckily for us he takes a personal interest in our little stampboards operation, (as per his posts above) so we get a ton better personal service than being just client number 68748727473 for a large hosting company!

I've used David exclusively to host my various sites over the past 10 or 15 years, and his service is outstanding.

Glen