System Outage Tonight

[Scott Greczkowski]

I will be doing some major work to our web server tonight, and also may upgrade our forum software to the latest version which is supposed to fix a number of issues...

Some of the work I will be doing is installing new Web Serving Software that will work together with Apache to serve static files. Because of this change when the site comes back online you might need to login to your accounts again.

The amout of downtime is unknown but I hope for it to be a short of a period as possible.

Wish me luck.

Thanks for allowing us to continue making SatelliteGuys better for YOU!

 

[Frank Jr.]

Good Luck Scott!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Thanks I am working now, the site may go down for a few minutes at a time, but I figured I would keep it up since 95% of the work can be done while things are still running.

 

[Magic Static]

OH that's what is going on. The more I'm here the more I notice about the complexity of this site. My hats off to you for keeping your sanity and keeping this place alive.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok done for the night. I couldn't get the other software running unfortunately.

 

[Stargazer]

That explains why a few of my posts didn't go through last night. I figured it was maintenance since this site don't hardly ever go down. You are doing a great job Scott! Keep up the good work.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Its working good now... and I hope to have it working even better shortly.

If you a Pub Member after the work is done when you click on something on the screen when you here I want it to appear on your screen almost instantly with no delay.

For non Pub Members it will load faster as well but still will be bogged down by the ads since those are loaded externally (not from our servers) I wish we didn't have the ads but we need to pay the bills.

It's getting there. Stay Tuned!

 

[whitewolf8214]

keep up the great job scott

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

More work being done today so the site may be unavailable at times.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Just in case you are wondering what we are doing...

We are trying a number of caching options available as well as some different web server combinations including ngenix.

We are currently testing Varnish which is a caching solution. It seems to work great, the only issue however is that the only people seeing improved speed and page generation time are those who are not logged in... (and then its still slow loading because of the ads... I may place all those ads in iframes so it stops slowing down the loading of the satelliteguys content while its waiting for the ads to load.

We are now considering doing some web serving off of our database server which is sitting there BORED. It's server load is normally 0.20 or LOWER. (at the moment I am looking at it, it is 0.03!)

With Nginx we will be able to load balance the web application and use the 8 cores we have on the other server which are just sitting there idle! Once done this should mean a faster SatelliteGuys for YOU!

Why are we doing this in the middle of a day on a Saturday? Saturday is normally our slowest day as far as traffic goes, and this work requires a few hours to complete so its the best time for us to work. So sorry if the site is unavailable or you get errors today we hope the results will be worth the issues. Normally when this type of work is done it is normal to close the site. But we are trying to keep it open for you with as little downtime as possible.

Thanks for your understanding!

 

[Jim S.]

(and then its still slow loading because of the ads... I may place all those ads in iframes so it stops slowing down the loading of the satelliteguys content while its waiting for the ads to load.

That alone would be a huge improvement. Some sites, AVSForums for a prime example, are downright unusable at times because they wait forever for ads to load before they display any content.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

The servers have not had all their data synced. It just finished up a few minutes ago. Now on to configuring NGINX and the load balencing on the second server.

We are almost there!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

We are almost there... final configuration will take place tonight between 7pm ET and 9PM ET.

The server may act flakey or may not be available for a few minutes at a time as we finish this work!

Thanks for your patience!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Looks like the big part of the cutover has been done so I have reopened the site.

Work is still being done so you may still see errors here and there. Thanks for your patience!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

We are done for the night! We are now operating off of two web servers using special load balance technology!

And while our work is 99% done there still is some minor tweaking that needs to be done as well as adding php caching and full gzip support. This work will be done in the morning and should not require any down time.

By doing this we have cut our server load on our first web server by more then half!

So hows things running? Better? Faster? about the same? Slower? Remember this is without caching turned on so it will get even better when that tweaking is done.

Thanks everyone for your patience as we worked to make SatelliteGuys better for YOU!

 

[hdtvtechno]

looking good Alot better faster now!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Working on things again now, the caching is giving us issues.

Hopefully things will be fixed shortly.

 

[vB Support]

just a test, ignore me.

 

[goaliebob99]

Dont know if your aware of this, but the site seems to be on and off at times.. I kept getting this error just a few min ago.

Fatal error: Call to a member function get() on a non-object in /usr/home/satellit/public_html/includes/class_datastore.php on line 553

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Almost done.

Get ready to ZOOM!