Spudfiles performance

[starman]

Maybe it's the power of suggestion but Spudfiles seems to be much faster and snappier since the downtime yesterday.

PCGUY, care to overview for us the changes that were made?

[MaxuS the 2nd]

You are not wrong starman, it does seem faster indeed.

[psycix]

A server change is said to be the reason so maybe its running on a faster server now.
Though I also would like to get more details of this.

BTW, it said "In the meantime, go check out theopia and bcarms" but both sites gave an SQL error page, so they were probably overcrowded.

[Fnord]

A while before the downtime, I noticed spudfiles getting stuck in an infinite loop when attempting to process page requests. I assume this was somehow related to the server change?

[frankrede]

The archive is broken:(

[PCGUY]

Alright, here is the story.

I took SpudFiles down on Thursday evening to move servers. I locked up the forum (with the message that said go to Theopia or BCARMS) so that no new posts and such could be made.

I then started the transfer. It was going to take about ~10 hours to move all of the data from 1 server to the other, so I let it go and watched it for a little while until I went to bed. My plan was to wake up in the morning before work and finish it up.

Well I ended up waking up late, and not having time to do anything with it before I went to work. I was going to try to work on it from work as well, however it is far too busy for me to even sit down for a few minutes. I ended up deciding I would wait until I got home from work to finish it up.

Not long before I leave work, I get a call from a member telling me that Theo/BCARMS is down. I get off work and come home and look to find a disaster.

The new server went to do an auto update in the middle of the night, when I was transferring SpudFiles from the old server to the new server. When the update ran, it failed and it broke mySQL thus taking down BCARMS and Theopia. It also stopped my 10 hour transfer about half way through. I had no idea it had done this until nearly 20 hours after I started the transfer (since I was at work).

I decided that I was not going to wait for the transfer again, so I put SpudFiles on a DVD and went back into work and started using our massive amount of bandwidth to upload SpudFiles to the new server.

I monitored it for a while (it's almost 6pm on Friday now) and I decided to leave work and let it go since they were going to be setting the alarm soon. I come home and I get on to check the status of the transfer, to discover it has STOPPED AGAIN. I think about it for a little while, and realize that I have all of the computers set to shutdown at work at 6pm, and it shut it down during my transfer!

So now it's about 7pm and I drive back to work, get back into the building, and restart the transfer. I again monitor it for a little while, and leave. This time it finishes.

It's about 9PM on Friday now and it had finished, and I was due at a get together at a friends over an hour ago so I go and use a computer there to extract everything on the server and reimport the databases. It completes, and I change the DNS on the spudfiles.com domain to point to the new server. Right away the changes are showing as live on the computer I was on, so I go and I open the forum back up on the new server, and leave the old server shut down.

I finally get home at about midnight and I take a look, and I am still getting the SpudFiles down message, but it's coming from the new server. I didn't understand how that could have happened, and I went and turned SpudFiles back on again. Then, everything started working fine.

I believe what happened is that even though it was showing that the SpudFiles domain was pointing to the new server when I was away from home, it truely wasn't and I ended up turning SpudFiles back on on the old server by mistake. So a few people posted, then their DNS got updated and started showing SpudFiles on the new server. This explains the "disappearing" posts, as for those few hours some people were getting the old SpudFiles, and some were getting the new.

I then made it impossible to load SpudFiles -period- from the old server, to ensure everyone was forced to the new one and there was no confusion.

Yes, the new server is much faster, it's the same server I have had BCARMS and Theopia on for some time now.

[PCGUY]

The archive is broken:(

Fixed. If you guys have issues with anything, please let me know.

[jrrdw]

So what did you do with the old server?

[PCGUY]

I'm going to let the hosting plan expire. I am now paying for a more expensive, but much better hosting plan. I have a virtual private server.

[jrrdw]

"I have a virtual private server." Awesome! What do you plan on reconfigureing first? I'm sure you have some kind of cool tweek up your sleeve.

[spudkilla]

You should make the old one a "Spudfiles CS:S dedicated server". That would be epic.

[psycix]

Wow, you seem to have had a hard time with that server change, luckily its all done now.
And besides the server, I bet that spudfiles itself will also get something fancy right?

[brplatz]

the chat is not working for me. this is the second computer Ive tried it on.

[spuzi14]

The chats not working for me either. It loads the background but that's it. It doesn't load who's on or the area that I type or anything else for that matter.

[Sticky_Tape]

Same with me not working olny background. What is downtime?