Temporarily Starving the Faeries

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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caughtatwork
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Temporarily Starving the Faeries

Post by caughtatwork » 11 August 08 2:19 pm

As some have noticed there has been a reduction in the service availability of the GCA wesbite.

We are attempting to address this with some back end changes.

In the meantime we are turning off the daily feeds. We will attempt to store the feeds and the intention is to rerun them when the backend changes are readied.

At this stage we hope to accomplish the job in the next couple of days, but will advise as we progress.

Thanks for your understanding.
The GCA Developers.

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 11 August 08 6:09 pm

if anyone notices any marked changes in performance of the site over the next couple of days, please let us know by posting here. thanks!

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Map Monkey
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Post by Map Monkey » 11 August 08 7:02 pm

Submitting posts (like this) have been returning errors in the last 20 minutes, took 5 attempts....Previewing of the post has been fine. :?

mm

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caughtatwork
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re: errors

Post by caughtatwork » 11 August 08 7:28 pm

You noticed that too?

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Team Piggy
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Post by Team Piggy » 11 August 08 8:14 pm

Same same, submitting posts is taking forever. Even worse than last time this issue raised its head...
I had one stretch to 18 minutes yesterday.

Note this one only took 2 mins. ***

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Post by caughtatwork » 11 August 08 8:56 pm

Yep. It is to note that there are over 100,000 threads.

I'd hate to lose history, but I wonder if trimming the database down to remove some of the crud would annoy people too much?

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Post by Damo. » 11 August 08 9:30 pm

caughtatwork wrote:Yep. It is to note that there are over 100,000 threads.

I'd hate to lose history, but I wonder if trimming the database down to remove some of the crud would annoy people too much?
I don't think many people use the search so most probably wouldn't notice! It would be a shame to lose some history though.

Maybe threads more than 4 years old with 4 posts or less could be culled?

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Post by mtrax » 11 August 08 9:43 pm

are all these a bit of a stop-gap measure.. I've seem bigger database on other forums but less problems.
Is the resource shortage memory/CPU or bandwidth?

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Post by caughtatwork » 11 August 08 9:51 pm

CPU and RAM are our biggest issues.

We are on a machine that is kindly provided to us free of charge by Ideology.

We have looked to moving to our own dual server environment (webserver and database machines) but we can't afford the $5,000 a year to run it.

We have no funding source. It's all voluntary effort by the developers.

We have looked at donations, but once we move off the existing server there is no going back. i.e. If we get funding for the first year, then each year after that it's a risky proposition to get funding. If we didn't get funding for the next year GCA would be dead in the water.

It's a decision that the community would need to make, but each time it's put up for discussion there's an initial flurry of interest then nothing.

With the number of people here that use the site (for the forums or otherwise) I would like to think that we could sustain ourselves without mandating a fee to use the system, but the danger is we can't and we die a horrible, horrible death.

It may be time to move seriously to asking for donations and moving to a dedicated machine.

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Post by mtrax » 11 August 08 10:29 pm

perhaps we should look are moving part of the service off , would that make it cheaper? or is that fee for h/w or co-location? since its an annual fee I assume its the housing of the server that's the cost.
If you split the service then would you be able to use a std web hosting as that would significantly reduce the cost.

Otherwise perhaps we could try and try an snag a donation from an ISP to locate the server.
BTW if you want to raise some funds then perhaps some coin sales or geo-hardware would be the way to go.

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Post by caughtatwork » 11 August 08 11:05 pm

http://forum.geocaching.com.au/viewtopi ... 9&start=60

We've got this thread on funding, so I'll address your questions in there. That should keep things of a similar nature together.

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 13 August 08 9:18 am

any noticeable change in speed for anyone?

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Post by mtrax » 13 August 08 11:28 am

so far so good.. , although not super its acceptable.. better thanks

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Post by Map Monkey » 13 August 08 12:29 pm

It seems to be working ok now, though i never took notice of the "speed" of posting, rather the success or otherwise. :P

Didn't we have an [archived] button at one stage that would do "something", or was that just a locking of the thread? :? :)

mm

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Post by ideology » 13 August 08 2:30 pm

thanks
fyi we aren't fishing for reports of speed increases... we are trying to work out what is causing a load which is higher than we think it ought to be. hence we turned off the feed to see whether they were the things bogging down the site. if there's not much difference, that means it's not the feed - it's something else

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