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Is anyone else having problems connecting to the site? I've had times when I couldn't connect for quite some time, both today and yesterday.
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Connectivity
Yes, it has been going on for a while.
Portia
Getting worse but it's being worked on
Piper is doing some tuning of the machinery but yes, it's been bad today. We hope it will be better soon.
Hugs,Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The problem...
Basically, our traffic took a 11% jump after Christmas. It was already as high as it has ever been consistently. We are now having 20,000 readers per day, day after day. It's a bunch. Even in the middle of the night, we have over 200 people on the site at any particular time except the 15 minutes we do auto-maintenance. Most of the rest of the time, we've been at or above 300 visitors the whole year of 2011. Now we're hitting or exceeding 350 for much of the day.
We just upped the memory grab of the database engine because we have plenty of memory, but even with eight cores, we are running out of processing power in the tight spots. Before 2012 is out, we are going to have to offload the database to a second server and perhaps use two servers for the front end. This will cost another 1500 to 3000 bucks, but we're not ready to tackle that yet. We have to upgrade the software to even hope to make it work. Be prepared for some day-long outages in the next few weeks.
Hugs,Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Yup
I feel for you and your band of elves.
Sometimes being popular can be even worse than being unpopular!
Still, if BCTS will be off-line for short periods, that should encourage me to write... right?
Penny
How about left?
Or maybe that should be "correct"?
Peace be with you and Blessed be
Peace be with you and Blessed be
Middle of the Day
RAMI
I guess your talking about middle of the night in the U.S, because, when it's midnight on the East Coast U.S. It is noon in S.E. Asia. Are there any readers in S.E. Asia?
Rami
RAMI
Lots
Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, India and Sri Lanka all have a fair number of readers. Also China, Viet Nam, Taiwan and the Phillipines all have some.
Hugs,Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
A picture is worth...
...whatever; but a picture can consume the same bandwidth as a complete chapter of a story. Or more.
I certainly wouldn't want BC to look as flat and featureless as FM, but is a file-size limit on pictures (especially picture signatures in comments/blogs) a worthwhile option simply to hold the fort until the money is in to upgrade the front-end?
Is there a theme available where pictures (or even more graphical content) are suppressed? That way I could give back my own excess bandwidth without discommoding others.
And that would also help me see more content on my screen - sometimes I only get two blog entries or three/four comments per screen.
Xi
Not Bandwidth
The problem is not bandwidth or static content like pictures, the bottleneck is processing power to handle database requests. Since BC is built on dynamic pages using a generic database engine (unlike FM which has a tuned database engine and makes much fewer calls to it besides), it's actually easy to overwhelm the ability of our 8-core processor to keep up.
On the old BC, our bottleneck was memory space and reducing the size of pictures would have helped some, but we now have 16gig of memory and can up grade to 24 or 32 if we need to, but we don't need to so far. Instead, we are trying to trade memory for processing power through various optimizations. So far, this isn't very productive, we're actually using LESS memory now than on the old BC because the 8-cores are more efficient at moving things in and out of memory than the old 2/4-core system.
Hugs,Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Site Maintenance
For all of us who read, use and enjoy this site a heartfelt thank you for all that Erin, Piper and the rest of the staff of BCTS do to provide us with this treasure. Bless all of you for your dedication and efforts. This reminds me I need to visit The Hatbox :)
Lots of hugs, Sarah Ann
Is that why I had trouble
Is that why I had trouble getting on this morning?