Welcome to our NEW Home. Meet Ariel (DB Server) and Belle (Front-End). Both servers are Cloud-Servers, hosted outside bridgewater but we are still maintaining our Bridgewater Facility for the time being. Let me know if you notice any speed/performance increases or decreases as time goes.
-Piper
-- Old Message Below --
Hi everyone! This note is just to let you know that BigCloset is currently in Read-Only Mode. What this means is that you can't add new stories, blogs, forum posts, comments etc. You can't leave kudos, send pm's or do just about anything that would require a "write" to the database. (this includes logging-in).
The reason for this is that we are currently doing upgrades to the BigCloset Back-End Infrastructure in hopes of increasing speed and performance. We will take down this notice, and turn off read-only mode as soon as everything is completed, but on the good side, we're hoping to keep BigCloset online for Reading the whole time!
-Piper
Comments
Cool
That was fast and painless from my end. Please explain a "cloud-server" for the technically backward. Is it a physical server that you own, is it leased computing capacity, or something else entirely?
Yes, yes it is :)
Actually, it is leased capacity on distributed machines located in, i think, Kansas somewhere.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
What is this?
What is this?
"Opening and ending tag mismatch: small and i on line 37. Error code: 76
•Unexpected end tag : i on line 37. Error code: 76"
Caching problem
Those are XML errors from the Hatbox box further down the page. There's some sort of caching mis-sync in loading the XML. We will deal with them tomorrow.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
congratz
congo rats on your move to cloud serverage. who did you go with?
faster for me
going from homepage to a blog was very sluggish, but now it is fast. thank you.
Over Here In UK
Over here in uk, load times seem to be pretty fast on blogs, stories, etc.
Well done
When I got your message it looked like an open-ended commitment. So I went to bed. Now, next morning, I see you are in action again and certainly allowing me anything I have tried so far. From one who had been involved in transfers in "the bad old days", Congratulations!
Changes to layout
I'm not sure what you are expecting, or whether I can post this but the runner on the rhs which lets me know how far down a page I am, has gone
Good luck
Rhona McCloud
Not our doing
We didn't change formatting and the runner on the right hand side is a function of your browser, not our software.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I noticed...
that pages load much faster. Yay!
~And so it goes...
Seems Faster
Not sure how much I trust the judgement, but response seems a little faster.
Faster
Yes, it is faster. For some things, about three times as fast. For others, just a bit slower. Average about a 50% improvement in speed over complex things like page loads.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hiccup
Sorry for the hiccup thee folks. I was trying to track down some errors that cropped up after last nights transfer and I had to use a mule-kick to get everything to align. :P
-Piper
Brute-Force
After a couple more Mule-kicks things are "Better" again :P
-Piper
Reconfig
It "seems" much faster at least from my point of view/ It also explains the "Menu Load Error" message I get at the top right of the page.I guess all will be dealt with in the fullness of time. Kudos to the entire BCTS team and thank you.
Joanna
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
I've been periodically getting a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message page this evening.
Just to toss information out
Just to toss information out there.
I didn't see the site change until this morning (the 27th). In fact, blog posts from the front page claimed to be four days old last night. The only change to the site I saw in the last four days was that when I hit 'track' just because, I saw two comments added to two stories (one comment per story) yesterday morning.
Then, this morning, I suddenly saw days worth of posts suddenly appear, as if they'd been there all along.
No, it couldn't have been a cache on my end. Two machines, numerous separate internet connections, and at least one reboot during that period. That includes a couple of 'site not available', some errors showing on the front page, and other signs that the site was being worked on.
This isn't a complaint, it's just additional information.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
We downgraded the site
We downgraded the site to a stable version of the support software this morning to avoid those errors until we can find out what is causing them. It's still faster than our old set-up but it is also a little shakier because the cloud hardware bottlenecks more easily. We are trying to keep the cloud cost below what we were paying for colo. It still is by about $19. :)
If we can iron out the kinks in this and get that speed back without the errors, it would be good.
You were probably running into the errors so you never got to load the new stuff on the site until we did the downgrade this morning.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Interesting. I did see a
Interesting. I did see a single error, but that was only once or twice (I didn't write it down). The rest of the time it behaved normally. It even took a Kudo, which surprised me. I didn't try to post, because I never saw an updated.
Good luck at tracking it down.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
HHVM, PHP7 & PHP5.6
There was some weird error, where every time someone tried to register a new account, it would CRASH HHVM with a GPF.
It's related to drupal not passing a proper $stdClass object for IPAddress when using HHVM latest stable.
Other errors I saw show up (without cache) was some pages had Javascript, others didnt.
When using PHP7 most everything worked correctly except several "shortcuts" that we (the admins) use to manage the front page, weren't there. So it was fine for y'all but not us :)
We have downgraded to PHP5.6 and other than having to increase the open files limit on the front-end VM (which was causing many 404 forbidden errors, when Apache would go to open a new file and suddenly the server would deny all file requests) everything seems to be fine.
-HuGgLeS-
-Piper
BigCloset Cloud - Tech Journal
If you are curious... I've done a bit of a Tech Journal @ StoryPortal.Net. http://storyportal.net/category/fictionsites/bigcloset/tech-...
We have a private basecamp for stuff, and I've posted progress along the way of what I've been doing and I ported that to the SPFN wordpress site if you want to follow it.
-Piper
speed difference
Here in Warrington UK, speed has increased to such an extent that I don't always realise that it's changed. Much quicker. Thank you.
'My Stories'
Overall the response times are good, but opening, or refreshing 'My Stories' now takes considerably longer. From clicking the link (or hitting Ctrl-R) there's a 15-20 second delay before the handshaking starts to load the new page. This behaviour started when the site was downgraded.
Shiraz
I don't know if this is
I don't know if this is useful or not. I received this error when I just opened up BigCloset after it being closed for about two hours.
Start tag expected, '<' not found on line 1. Error code: 4
Warning message
Opening and ending tag mismatch: div and table on line 17. Error code: 76
Unexpected end tag : strong on line 552. Error code: 76
Tag break invalid on line 8. Error code: 801
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Cloud Updates and BC
I thought I'd take a moment to update this thread.
While we are still on cloud (for the time being), we discovered the "cloud" solution we are using worked best with updated versions of PHP. Unfortunately BigCloset, does not like those updated versions of php.
When we downgraded PHP we incurred extra bottlenecks and instability.
I've been spending a LOT of time trying to profile our code, fix software bottlenecks, and improve things any way I can.
We are finally down to what we hope to be a fairly stable position for a bit. I have speed back to about what it was before the move, and stability is close to what it was if not perfect.
While we do have plans to move things back to bridgewater, I'm going to make some hardware moves first, so that's waiting on my available schedule (having a toddler is not an easy first job, and bigcloset is not an easy 2nd).
So please everyone, bear with us, I promise we will be fast again soon, and stable as can be!
-Piper