Forums on new server

Discussion in 'Forum Announcements and Feedback' started by Daniel Mosquin, Jan 17, 2011.

  1. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    The upgrade went semi-smoothly, and we managed to accomplish most of what we wanted to today with the move to the new server (still a few things to work out with the weblog software on the site).

    This was a 2-in-1 upgrade:

    The database that holds the forums data moved to a newer, faster machine. It is backed up nightly.

    The web server that runs the forum software was moved to a newer machine (I'm not sure if it will turn out to be faster, but we're monitoring, and will see if we need to step up the server CPU and RAM). We've upped the security significantly (this being part of the challenges of moving to the new machine, as we had to figure out how to work within the new security systems).

    While this server is "backed up" on a weekly-or-so basis, we're going to figure out a way to make that happen more frequently.

    Server uptime should increase slightly, as the server is now centrally-maintained by UBC instead of the people in our faculty.


    Please report any errors or funny things that you notice in reply to this thread.

    Thanks.
     
  2. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    ...and we're back. Having some trouble with the database server that is only showing up now (as opposed to testing) that there is some load on the machine with many people connecting to it.

    So, we've upgraded the database software and added more connections, will see if that resolves the issue.
     
  3. janetdoyle

    janetdoyle Active Member 10 Years

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    Wonderful. I check in occasionally, and as I gear up for more gardening questions and sharing in the spring will be looking forward to the usual fine information and comments regarding plants. I hope many of the previous posters from the past will be here too.
     
  4. Michael F

    Michael F Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Took just over a day for the server to update the link and the forums to re-appear here
     
  5. neilvan

    neilvan Member

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    Just curious why the "Photography and Art" forum got archived, with no new posts or replies being allowed? Is this related to the migration to the new server? Can this be rectified?
     
  6. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Read this thread from nearly a year ago (but more on this topic re: reopening areas from me soon)
     
  7. maf

    maf Generous Contributor Maple Society 10 Years

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    The forum was down again for me all day today, probably around 8 hours, (would have been through the night in BC). Downforeveryoneorjustme.com indicated it was down also.
     
  8. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Yes, we had runaway processes on the web server (the database server was fine). I made a tweak after finally stopping the web server this morning that may help.

    The server was logging all hits and quickly building up a massive log file, and I'm guessing it reached the memory limit. I turned off access logging, since we are using Google Analytics these days anyway.
     
  9. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    Forums inaccessible from late last night to about 5 minutes ago.
     
  10. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Yep, still having issues with the setup of the web server.

    This is our next step -- to temporarily bump up the RAM to see if it resolves the problem over the weekend.

    We're presently at the base level in this server configuration, so we're trying to find out what we need without overpaying for RAM / CPU that sits idle.
     
  11. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    RAM has been bumped up for the time being from 1GB to 4GB, we'll see if the site doesn't get overloaded now. Would more than double our server costs annually if this is the only solution. :-(
     
  12. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    The price of popularity.
     
  13. Michael F

    Michael F Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Site was down for most of today (UK time)
     
  14. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Ok, site survived the weekend. Sometime in the next day or so, we'll be reducing the RAM to 2GB to see if that's the right level for the server.
     
  15. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    We've had the virtual server switched from 4GB RAM to 2GB RAM. If the server crashes due to load, we know how to resolve it, at least (increase the RAM)
     
  16. wcutler

    wcutler Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator VCBF Cherry Scout 10 Years

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    Daniel, does that have anything to do with the number of photos inserted in a single posting? Last year, Mariko and I both had instances where we'd done postings with a lot of photos that weren't there when we saved the postings.
     
  17. turtile

    turtile Member

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    ...and spammers! At one point, 90% of my server resources were being used by spammers.
     
  18. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    I don't think so, but can't say for certain.
     
  19. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    *nod* Yes, I put measures into place to slow down spam registrations a couple months ago, so they've been reduced from about 20/day to 2-3.

    And, just in the past couple days, put in measures to severely reduce attempts to cut down spam on the weblogs. Went from 2000/day to 2, and significantly reduced server load.
     
  20. wcutler

    wcutler Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator VCBF Cherry Scout 10 Years

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    Photo upload failed

    I just tried to upload one photo that's 5.29mb and twice got the message "photo upload failed". I reduced the size and it uploaded ok. That's supposed to be within the filesize limit.
     
  21. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Thanks for the bug report. That'll be something that wasn't copied over in the settings for either the web server or scripting language. Will look at it tomorrow.
     
  22. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    That bug should be fixed now.
     
  23. Daniel Mosquin

    Daniel Mosquin Paragon of Plants UBC Botanical Garden Forums Administrator Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Anyone else of the belief that the forums are being sluggish today?
     
  24. Michael F

    Michael F Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator 10 Years

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    Fine most of the day, but when I first looked this morning (late last night, Vancouver time), it wouldn't open at all.
     
  25. wcutler

    wcutler Paragon of Plants Forums Moderator VCBF Cherry Scout 10 Years

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    It was ok the one time I looked today, but I had the same problem around 12:30am this morning. Got one forum listing to open, but nothing else.
     

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