As most of you know, we’ve been making improvements to our forum infrastructure this fall. Despite some major improvements, we’ve been battling a pesky slowness issue that affects us somewhat randomly. When you see it take forever to load a page, that’s what we’re talking about. Oddly, seconds later, the forum returns to its normal fraction of a second page loads.
Sometime this week, we’ll be upgrading the connectivity between our forum servers to operate at gigabit speed. Our servers will be on their own private network, too, which means they won’t be affected by other datacenter traffic. We’re quite sure that this will clear up the periodic slowness plus make the forum even snappier than ever.
We’ll probably be down for a couple of hours due to physical relocation of servers. We plan to do this in the morning (midwest US) hours to minimize the inconvenience to our members. Thanks for your patience!
Thanks for this info, Roger. The slowness of the forums has been really frustrating. I would have responded earlier, but it took 15 minutes to load this thread…
“Pesky” is one way to put it. Unbelievably annoying and frustrating is another way. I know you guys are trying your best (and I really do appreciate it) but…I want my quick CC back! (I think that makes me a child of the immediate gratification generation).
or are we back and running or running *** until*** you can get it complete. I was unable to load the forum most all of today. Now it is slow and I am wondering if this is the FIX?
Today’s outage wasn’t the upgrade. In trying to address the slowness issue prior to the server moves, a server tech made a change that inadvertently cut the communication speed between the servers by a factor of 10. That took the forums down completely, and it took a while to identify and correct the problem.
The slowness issue will be with us for another day or two, max. We have changed the server moves to emergency priority. Thanks (again!) for your patience.
The slowness comes and goes. Normally, it takes about a quarter of a second to generate a page (you may not see it that quickly depending on your connection). When we hit the slowness wall, it can take many seconds. The good news is, we think we know the cause now and the changes we’ll make (maybe Wednesday AM?) should clear it up.
The main server move is scheduled for Wednesday morning, 6 - 9 AM Chicago time. We’ll be down during that period. Once again, thanks for your patience.
This outage will be the largest part of the slowness fix, but we’ll have a brief interruption within 24 hours after the first one for a smaller server move. That should cure it for once and for all.
Central Daylight Time is GMT -6, so it sounds like evening if I did the math right, banedon. Looks like the move will be happening a little later, more like 8 - 10 AM CDT.
In trying to address the slowness issue prior to the server moves, a server tech made a change that inadvertently cut the communication speed between the servers by a factor of 10. That took the forums down completely, and it took a while to identify and correct the problem.
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