Down Time...

[Magenta]

What happened then?!

 

[Edmundo]

No idea. Not good, was it?

 

[Magenta]

Didn't look too healthy!

Thought perhaps the hosts weren't impressed by the sight of Lizzie's boobs! lol

 

[Banana]

Speaking with them now.....

 

[Edmundo]

Who? The hosts, or Lizzie's boobs.

I must be the only one who hasn't seen 'em!

 

[ianhl]

It`s okay Ed I missed them too :sad: :sad:

 

[Banana]

We've been too too busy with over 100 queries per second to the database. Which I suspect is closely related to Lizzie's boobs!

 

[Edmundo]

Lizzie's boobs brought down the GPG? I heard they were impressive, but that's ridiculous!

 

[Nada Bee]

They were Ed!!!

I have all 9 pics of Lizze Highest bidder gets them all, all proceed go to Bees United hehe

 

[Fonzy]

i have 4.

i'll show you mine if you show me yours.

And can i see the pics too?

 

[JTofBFC]

"The server is too busy at the moment. If you are seeing this message please do NOT try to access the board again right now - give it 15 minutes or so. We're experiencing very high usage and we've been forced to implement a rationing of the GPGs use of the system's resources (as we have to be good neighbours with the others that share the server). If you keep retrying you are NOT helping to reduce our load on the server - as it takes resources to turn you away. Of course we are progressing to resolve this situation and to resume normal services. However, use of the GPG continues to grow at an more-than-healthy rate. That's the price of success huh. A 4th round FA Cup draw and look what happens..... "

Doesnt look as though the change of server has worked out too well then. The cheapest option is not always the best!!

It would be a sad state of affairs if the board crashed for a week just as Noades tried to put the club into liquidation.

Is there a contingency plan????

 

[Mr Tree]

hmmm

never one to criticise those in charge, if any more problems occur, i'm sure the natives really will start getting very restless

 

[Banana]

The board has not been anyway near being "crashed for a week". It's been off-line for a couple of hours twice very late in the evening.

The problem is that the board gets busier and busier. At our *current* usage the GPG will have well over 5 millions hits this month this compares to 3.3 million in November, and 2.6 in October. Some growth.

Our current provider gives us plenty of choices for growth. Bandwidth, disc, CPU etc. are all cheaper in the US plus there's no VAT. So please don't think there is anything other than growing pains we would have with any provider.

A contingency plan to reduce resource consumption (including the suspension of the Chit Chat forum) has been implemented. Didn't you notice you're accessing the GPG

 

[Banana]

hmmm

never one to criticise those in charge, if any more problems occur, i'm sure the natives really will start getting very restless

Glad you've asked them Dan. One can always rely on Dan for constructive sh*t like that.

 

[JTofBFC]

The board has not been anyway near being "crashed for a week". It's been off-line for a couple of hours twice very late in the evening.

The problem is that the board gets busier and busier. At our *current* usage the GPG will have well over 5 millions hits this month this compares to 3.3 million in November, and 2.6 in October. Some growth.

Our current provider gives us plenty of choices for growth. Bandwidth, disc, CPU etc. are all cheaper in the US plus there's no VAT. So please don't think there is anything other than growing pains we would have with any provider.

A contingency plan to reduce resource consumption (including the suspension of the Chit Chat forum) has been implemented. Didn't you notice you're accessing the GPG

Seeing as you're so pernickety about grammer etc, you will have seen that I said "It would be a problem if it crashed for a week". I didnt imply it had and am well aware it has been down for a couple of hours only. I have no problem with that but you are surely aware that if the financial situation at the club deteriorates to the extent it could and the doomsday scenario occurs, this board could suddenly have very high demand. It would be a shame if you have selected a server that cannot or is unwilling to accommodate the demand that might ensue.
I dont think shutting chit chat is the kind of contingency I had in mind.

 

[Banana]

What kind of contingency DID you have in mind?

 

[JTofBFC]

Moving to a server that CAN cope I suppose. You're the administrator.................

 

[Banana]

Exactly how much load do you think we should be able to cope with? Should we (read "a very small subset of the users") pay for all that extra capacity in order that one day it *might* be used based on your guess? (oh and remember we've doubled in usage in the last 2 months)

Also as it hasn't been "crashed for a week" - ever. Never since it started as the Red and White Taverna. Why why why do you even post such b***ocks. It'll also be tragic if a comet hit London at the same time as Noades sells GP - but, hey, we don't all preach doom and gloom. Why make out that a minor outage and a small reduction in service is the end of the world? What are your motives exactly?

I don't mean to be abrasive and throw this back in your face. I'm asking these questions so that you know what we're faced with - and that's just one variable there's bandwidth, disc space, price, etc.. And I have to take the time to answer those questions, trade them off against price, negotiate with the service provider, find the funding, deal with an user base who think it is their god-given right to post on the board for free and have it available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Chit Chat is the busist forum, have nothing to do with the grand events going on at BFC - so why is closing it not a contingency plan to have the rest of the forums up and running?

Sorry to everyone else to rant on but sometimes I really f***ing wonder what's going through some people's minds. Still something to add the "things that annoy you" with CC reopens.

 

[JTofBFC]

Please yourself I dont f****g care anyway. As long as you're aware that if people keep getting error messages when they try to log in some will eventually go away altogether. Bit like when you f***D up all the passwords.

By the way, shouldn't administrators be setting an example of courtesy to members. I dont find your condescending tone very nice.

Anyway you're shot of me now Im going to bed.

 

[Banana]

I dont find your condescending tone very nice.

Ditto

 

[Sweepy]

GPG has snowballed this month. I'll happily accept the blame.

 

[yankee bees girlie]

Didn't look too healthy!

Thought perhaps the hosts weren't impressed by the sight of Lizzie's boobs! lol

haha you punk ass

 

[Pauly Paul]

Also as it hasn't been "crashed for a week" - ever. Never since it started as the Red and White Taverna. Why why why do you even post such b***ocks.

Err sorry but yes it has. A year or so ago around December if I recall correctly. I should know, I was the one trying to sort it out with the ISP.

 

[Wee Dave]

I'm being nice to Banana (at the moment) because he got rid of my 31 for me. Thanks Banana.

It's really not fair to diss the management for shifting the GPG to a cheaper server - pretty sure Mark ended up paying for the old one out of his own pocket.

I know a fair bit about this website lark and 5 million hits is one bugger of a lot.

The only thing I would be concerned about is shutting the chit-chat forum for any length of time. Sure as eggs is eggs, people will desert the GPG like lightning.

 

[Banana]

Ah yes - remember now....

Once then! A long time ago in internet time and a lot of things have changed then

 

[Banana]

Dave, there's no difference in the level of service, in fact we're getting much more bandwidth and CPU resources from the new provider. It would have happened whichever provider we were with. We doubled in traffic in the last 3 months. The previous hosting company acknowledged that couldn't compete with the prices for bandwidth etc. from companies across the Atlantic.

 

[Wee Dave]

Quite understand Nana. Believe it or not my post was in support of you. I think you've (largely) done a stirling job since you became Admin.

I would, though, stress that of all our forums (except G B Discussion) Chit Chat really shouldn't be blocked as a solution.

 

[Banana]

I understand your post was supportive Dave. I wanted to point out, however, that our "problems" are not due to moving to a less expensive solution.

Chit Chat was closed temporarily as it was the busiest and most trivial of all the forums. I also understand that Chit Chat helps the online community of BFC fans grow. It wasn't closed as a "solution" it was closed to address the immediate danger of the whole site being closed by the hosts. This morning the server load is down to 1-2 so it's reopened again. Users will be turned away from the GPG if the load gets too much or the board too heavily used.

I'm sure I'm telling my grandmother to suck eggs when I say that it's nigh on impossible to predict future traffic patterns. Our traffic for the FA Cup Draw was 60% more than any other time EVER on the GPG. There is no such thing as unlimited backwidth and unlimited resources. We could pay hundrends or thousands of pounds to cover the eventuality of being available to everyone one day when everyone decides to access the GPG - but you can never be sure i) it'll be enough and ii) it'd be a waste of money for the other 9999 days. Arriving at a resources-bought/price balance what we're trying to do.

 

[Houghton Bee]

if you want to cut back on forums, why not get rid of the away fans bit, the test forum, send announcements out by email instead of having that forum, get someone (if you dont have the time) to delete topics that were hardly used or have long since been used, maybe remove the hey jude forum and they set something up on their own site? just a few ideas

 

[Sweepy]

if you want to cut back on forums, why not get rid of the away fans bit, the test forum, send announcements out by email instead of having that forum, get someone (if you dont have the time) to delete topics that were hardly used or have long since been used, maybe remove the hey jude forum and they set something up on their own site? just a few ideas

The problem was the heavy usage of chit-chat, which was accelerated by Late Nite Wild and Florida strip-shows.

I trust Banana to sort it out, as long as he stops the moaning, just for once!

I think the server problems every December are caused by:

* College breaks
* Unpleasant weather leading to people staying indoors
* Bees fans wanting to use their new PC they got for Christmas.

Plenty of things to blame the Nananana for, but I reckon this thread is a bit harsh.

 

[Houghton Bee]

i wasnt blaming him, just giving some ideas to try and help resolve things

i'll happily go thru the older chit chat threads tomorrow if he wants to try that, and give me a temporary moderatorship.

 

[Amsterdam Bee]

Though to get back on track with the really important matter at hand here, whats this about a Florida strip show?

 

[davebee]

i think sweepy is right. The hey jude forum gets a fair bit of traffic, and could be redirected to their website. Keeping chit chat open is imperitive. The away fans forum gets bugger all traffic. Dunno how much space it is occupying though, and dunno how much space old threads take up. If it is significant i would take sweeps up on his offer. he has lots of spare time (as weve noticed) and would prob do a decent enough job of it. Good luck mr nananana no hard feelings. Sorry about the critical emial you received off me last night.

 

[Houghton Bee]

what? sweepy didnt recommend anything fool

 

[Edmundo]

The problem with Chit Chat is that it gets so much traffic, not that there are other forums. Indeed you could make a case for saying that the existence of other forums is a distraction from Chit Chat and thus helps. Getting rid of other forums won't solve our problems.

It's always annoying when the GPG is down, but nothing we can do will prevent it happening from time to time. Please don't have a pop at the people who are trying to minimise the disruption!

 

[Banana]

davebee/whippy et al. It nothing to do with space, or the number of forums. It's to do with the usage (busy-ness) of the system. Nothing to do with bandwidth either as such.

The problem is the pages are built dynamically, every time someone ask to look at a page it is built 'on-the-fly' from information kept in a database. This is completely different from just serving a static HTML page. The major difference is that the server has to do a lot of work to build the page - including getting the threads/posts/counters/usernames/ etc. etc. from the database. When a lot of people do this in a short space of time the server gets busy.

There are also some features of the Board software that are far more intensive than others (e.g. searching, building the database tables that the search engine uses). Most of the time (in fact about 99% of the time) the server can cope happily with the load. Very occassionally there's too much going on. As we are the heaviest users of the system we're naturally in the firing line when it comes to who to shutdown first.

This heavier-than-average usage is hard to track down to a particular activity - it being intermittent in behaviour.

For now I've switched on a feature of the Board software that prevents the board serving pages when the server is too busy. This gives the server a bit of breathing space to catch up on any backlog as it were. I'm monitoring the server load and have seen it creep into "too busy" terroritory a few times for 30 seconds or so at a time. Hopefully, people can wait that small period of time and try again.

For the more technically aware the server load (Linux) sits at between 1 and 2 most of the time. No pages are served when load is above 8. When it gets to 10 alarm bells ring in support at the hosting company. It has been above 30 when the site has been suspended previously.

 

[Mikey Bee]

What db does the GPG use ? You could dedicate x amount of CPU use exclusively for the db, for example, which then allows the other CPU's to deal with the dynamic page creation.

Just a thought

 

[Banana]

mysql. We're on a shared server and have no control over such things. Their requirements may be totally different to ours.....

 

[Mikey Bee]

It depends on how the server is configured but the application I used to support used SQL server and we had 500 concurrent users for most of the day. It was a quad processor machine so what we did was dedicate two of the CPU's to process the SQL requests and use the other two to do all the rest of the less intensive work.

I would be tempted to suggest this to them. Presumably the server hosts other bulletin board facilities so all of the other boards would also see a benefit from doing this, not just the GPG.

 

[Banana]

Without going too much into it, it's a bit more complicated than that. There's also an issue of table locking vs row locking in certain circumstances. There's also the issue of the hosting company wanting to keep all their servers configured the same. Also, there are many more web sites that do not have vbb software than those that do. Also, dedicating 2 CPUs to the database and 2 to the other processes means that the other 2 CPUs are available to the busy task even if the rest of the machine is idle! I do appreciate your input though. I think the success of the GPG will force upon us the dedicated server route sooner or later...then we can do what we want.

 

[Mr Tree]

Glad you've asked them Dan. One can always rely on Dan for constructive sh*t like that.

JTofBFC makes two very good points

1) if people keep seeing error messages, they will find another place to go

2) you have a condescending tone that isn't appreciated by a few people

All i'm pointing out, is that if we lose people from this site it will be to the DETRIMENT of the GPG. That was all. No need to throw your toys out the pram...

Good luck sorting it all out

 

[Mr Tree]

How come there are problems at 00:30 when 11 members and 3 guests are trying to use the board

 

[Edmundo]

Good question, Dan. I was wondering exactly the same thing.

 

[Banana]

The server is too busy. Not the site. The server hosts other sites as well - they're stealing the CPU.

 

[davebee]

so its THEM that is the problem not US. hmmm.

 

[Banana]

This time....yes.

Anyway we're moving to a dedicated server very soon. So in an "up yours" move I've turned off the load limiting....

 

[Mikey Bee]

Go on....turn the Search facility back on....be a :horns:

 

[Banana]

I will after we move. Later today or tomorrow.

 

[Mikey Bee]

:banana:

 

[Houghton Bee]

is the board going to be offline/are we having a new url?