Site Upgrade - The Aftermath

[Sterno]

click on my posts and get this
Oops! An error occurred: connection to 10.0.0.3:3312 failed (errno=111, msg=Connection refused)

 

[CaptJay]

Been getting a ton of 'IE cannot display this page' and '504 gateway Time-out' tonight - just a heads up in case its a server thing - although it could be report running services on the server; it was round about 5am EST

 

[pedromj]

This morning (CET) I've seen one time that the page had a problem with Nginx. IIRC, the error was related to its proxy configuration. I suppose the site has a proxy with Nginx and a web server with the same or another application.

 

[whiskey]

click on my posts and get this
Oops! An error occurred: connection to 10.0.0.3:3312 failed (errno=111, msg=Connection refused)

This error too this morning....

 

[rolygate]

The site was offline for 2 hours this morning when power failed at the hosts. Yes it's supposed to be a bulletproof UPS etc but there you go. One of the servers went down and that wrecked the site.

 

[whiskey]

wow Roly thats not good...I am sure your doing all you can..kudos

 

[rolygate]

I've experienced problems with upgrading forum software that took days to correct....but I've never heard of it taking weeks like this one. Anyone know why?

We did four things at the same time:
- upgraded vB3 to vB4
- changed to multiple servers
- changed to a DB server/webfacing servers configuration
- changed to Nginx as the server app

The main issue is that the vb3 >> vB4 upgrade has been particularly difficult as (a) their upgrade system is not optimal, and (b) the forum is so heavily extended. Many of the plugins don't work now, or are now in the core but don't function fully, so we have to wait for plugin upgrades. For example vbSEO is about the biggest, and there are major issues with it on vB4 that have not been addressed by vB or the plugin authors. 'Social groups' has also been wrecked and there is no fix currently.

Eventually it will get sorted out, although we may have to wait for others to write the code.

 

[pedromj]

The site was offline for 2 hours this morning when power failed at the hosts. Yes it's supposed to be a bulletproof UPS etc but there you go. One of the servers went down and that wrecked the site.

Have you thought of using a cheap cloud service to host the website?

 

[rolygate]

Yes, this is a good suggestion, and one we have fully investigated.

Unfortunately, cloud hosting does not work for heavily-loaded database-driven sites because you cannot add another server 'on demand', as with an HTML site. There are impossible issues with database synchronisation, since every DB has to be synced to every other DB every few seconds. In practice this is impossible on a heavily-loaded site since it doubles disk activity (or more) and means the site slows to a crawl, and disks burn out fast. Each DB has to sync with every other DB and it all ties itself into a knot.

Cloud hosting cannot be used for this type of site at present. There is a way it might be utilised in the future, perhaps when the whole system is developed more: you might be able to feed the DB on a powerful, regular, dedicated server to webservers in the cloud. Somebody might be doing this now but I don't know of a service that does. We don't currently need this, as our configuration works OK, it's more of an economic issue than anything else, perhaps when we have that many web-facing servers and load balancers that it becomes necessary to look at the cheapest way of running the web-facing boxes.

I do run cloud-based sites and the technical issues don't go away, unfortunately. Just last week we lost a cloud hosted site, because the servers went down due to a power issue on both the server and the backups. The trouble is, the site has to be on a server somewhere, and in the end it's vulnerable to power issues. In theory that can't happen to cloud sites but as I say, last week it did - which scotches that theory

Currently, cloud hosting is good for simple HTML-based sites, CMS sites without much content changing, and servers running various sorts of web tasks. Unfortunately it's no good for modern, DB-driven sites if they are heavily loaded. Maybe with less than 5,000 visits a day or something but we passed that point a long time ago.

 

[Xanax]

You may not be aware of it but Internet Explorer has a very slow JavaScript engine and it does not perform well on modern websites. It can't be used for some modern website management tasks, for this reason. Opera has the fastest JS engine of all and will provide you with a very satisfactory experience on ECF - the site is very fast now, when viewed on a real browser.

If you are limited by your work PC, then get a portable version of your chosen browser and load it on a USB stick. I have heard of some organisations, particularly in the public sector, where IE6 is still installed on PCs. This represents incompetence of the highest level since IE6 is about the most vulnerable browser to exploits in existence - it's a pipeline into the PC for malware. But at least if they are that incompetent then USB portable apps should run fine.

CAUTION: if a PC is still running IE6 then you should treat it as compromised, ie infected by malware. These things often transfer themselves onto USB drives in order to propagate. It would be best not to plug the USB drive back into your home PC after use on a potentially compromised machine, unless you know how to stop autorun and the infection of your clean machine via the USB device.

My mom's work computer is pathettttttttiiiiicccc. Every year they issue her a crappy old IBM (old as in from 99-2003 that is still running an early version of XP) and it's slower than hell and doesn't support updating IE. She has a great job too. It's sad they would make her work on such a primitive computer when 100% of her work is done on the computer. She literally would not be able to do her job without a computer. I can't believe some work places still use IE6.

 

[pedromj]

Yes, this is a good suggestion, and one we have fully investigated ... point a long time ago.

I know "Cloud Computing" is still in its infancy. There are many open issues an challenges to cover before being a good solution for every service. Nevertheless, there are a few consolidated services as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and new ones as S4 - Super Simple Storage Service. The good of a real cloud service is that you should have a 100% availability for your services, as well as the flexibility of assigned resources. If a provider do not ensure those features, it is not a real cloud computing provider. For instance, Google offers its App Engine that runs applications over its infrastructure. Thus, the service has the same availability than other Google services. Here Google is acting as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider and is not profitable by the forum unless a version of vBulletin is made specifically for AppEngine. What is interesting to the forum is a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider like those I mentioned above, but I do not know if it is economically feasible.

 

[RedForeman]

My mom's work computer is pathettttttttiiiiicccc. Every year they issue her a crappy old IBM (old as in from 99-2003 that is still running an early version of XP) and it's slower than hell and doesn't support updating IE. She has a great job too. It's sad they would make her work on such a primitive computer when 100% of her work is done on the computer. She literally would not be able to do her job without a computer. I can't believe some work places still use IE6.

In a corp environment there's a lot of hidden costs to upgrading to newer stuff, both hardware and software. Simply moving up one version on a browser can break enterprise apps that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months of effort to fix. Usually a current version on enterprise software goes end of life or out of support before anyone budgets for the upgrade.

With hardware, it's only been in the last few years that the big companies have gone down to a 3-yr depreciation cycle on PCs. Everyone knows 3 years is a huge leap in technology/performance. There's also the cost of developing and supporting new platforms. Clearly your Mom is working for one that hasn't made that quantum leap yet. Or they just don't value her productivity as much as a new laptop.

 

[Warped3k]

click on my posts and get this
Oops! An error occurred: connection to 10.0.0.3:3312 failed (errno=111, msg=Connection refused)

This is a known current issue and our code monkey will get it fixed soon.

 

[Liv2Ski]

This is a known current issue and our code monkey will get it fixed soon.

Hopefully the code monkey will stick a bannana up this bugs rear end and beat it to death once and for all. Good luck Code Monkey!!!

 

[pedromj]

Code monkeys should be happy with these:

 

[whiskey]

Hopefully the code monkey will stick a bannana up this bugs rear end and beat it to death once and for all. Good luck Code Monkey!!!

I guess thats one way to put it....

 

[Elendil]

Not really liking that avatar today whiskey.

 

[tiburonfirst]

Not really liking that avatar today whiskey.

which one of the ten or so would that have been?

 

[Elendil]

 

[jimho]

In a corp environment there's a lot of hidden costs to upgrading to newer stuff, both hardware and software. Simply moving up one version on a browser can break enterprise apps that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months of effort to fix. Usually a current version on enterprise software goes end of life or out of support before anyone budgets for the upgrade.

With hardware, it's only been in the last few years that the big companies have gone down to a 3-yr depreciation cycle on PCs. Everyone knows 3 years is a huge leap in technology/performance. There's also the cost of developing and supporting new platforms. Clearly your Mom is working for one that hasn't made that quantum leap yet. Or they just don't value her productivity as much as a new laptop.

Nicely put- Very few large companies upgrade every three years. Most companies view IT as a cost as opposed to a business enabler - as such IT budgets have shrunk... Most larger companies have tossed all the work around asset management that they got with Y2K and are now struggling with some of the same problems again - they can't tell you what software is installed on their machines and have no idea what will happen when they upgrade . As opposed to having tools and technologies in place to manage the environment properly (which is viewed as an expense), the money is spent keeping the old environment running and digging their hole even deeper. Tendency is still to only upgrade when there is no choice and use it as an excuse (or justification to put it nicely) to spend more than would have been necessary had they kept pace.