Issues with the recent down-time

[TCO]

1. I would be very interested to learn what the cause of the recent down-time was. (If it's not all top secret and all.)

2. If the downtime was to reconfigure the servers to support the forums, I have one comment. Why not put the rest of the site down and leave the forums up. (i.e. reconfigure the other things around the forums.) Before Mark laughs or others decide this is a troll. Think about this: What is the horse that pulls the GS wagon? IT'S THE APOLYTON FORUMS. In that case, it makes a lot of sense to put othere things down and keep the forums up. (If possible of course.) The only reason I say this, is that I think that GS/Mark and Dan may not be thinking in these terms.

[Buck Birdseed]

I'd also like to know why you've disabled so many forum features, after previously saying you wouldn't. Problems?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

jusgt for reference... was the logged user list on the main forum page removed?

[Buck Birdseed]

AFAIK, yes. And the Avatars.

[Asher]

I think the best solution is to put the Poly forums and Poly on seperate servers. Give the forums their own server (Many sites do this, including Anandtech.com and other major forum sites).

www.apolyton.net points to this existing server.
forums.apolyton.net would point to the forums server.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

And if the forums were on their own, hardware requirements would not be as great, perhaps a 2000 USD low end server could cope? Perhaps with only one PIII 800 1 gb SDRAM or similar?

[Asher]

I'm willing to bet the forums use up the biggest bulk of CPU usage, actually.

They're powered by MySQL, so it's gotta do a ton of database queries each time you view a page.

The actual webhosting itself doesn't take too much power for the rest of the site.

[TCO]

How do UBB and VBB differ? In terms of server usage? and MySQL usage?

[Caesar the Great]

when my pages finish loading i get an error message.... so i have to stop before they fully load???

[Urban Ranger]

I have no problems with suspension of some features if that allows the forums to move along.

Originally posted by GP
How do UBB and VBB differ? In terms of server usage? and MySQL usage?

uBB uses Perl scripts to generate the pages, while vBB uses PHP to generate the pages with mySQL as the database. Perl looks like line noise to those who don't know it. Or rather, even to those who know it

Bringing down the rest of the site except for the forums won't work. If they were doing hardware they needed to shut down the whole server. If they were slotting in newer/faster versions of http server (Apache) or mySQL they'd need to shut down these programs.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Caesar the Great
when my pages finish loading i get an error message.... so i have to stop before they fully load???

1. What is the error message?
2. Did it prevent the page from being displayed?
3. What browser and OS were you using?

[DanQ]

A full announcement is forthcoming -- it is being worked on at the moment and will be posted when it is complete. Thank you for your patience.

<I>I'd also like to know why you've disabled so many forum features, after previously saying you wouldn't.</I>

Snapcase: circumstances change that sometimes force us to re-evaluate our practices. Please see the "Open Letter from ACS Admin" dated November 6th -- it addresses some of these issues.

---------------
Dan; Apolyton CS

[MarkG]

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=33244