Announcement Upgrade and Downtime This week

[Mark from Brisbane]

Squint protection is a lie....

Nah I was drilling some holes into the rolled aliminum beam on the outdoor deck. And some bits of metal had got behond my safety glasses and about 4 hours later stabbed into my eye. Let it go until it was too much to handle, went to GP, then optometrist, optometist found it but couldn't fix it, so he shuttled me to emergency because one bit was right near the centre and embedded in like a nail and starting to rust

**** , that’s a bit serious

 

[Dan]

Stage one is now complete and we are on the latest version of the software, next will be the server move. There is some clean up on this new version and the theme and I will do my best to get that completed ASAP.

If you have support needs or issues, please put them here

Support and Issues

Since there are a bunch of upgrades going on, we have opened up this section for support topics. Please tag me (@Dan) in any posts so I get alerts.

silvertails.net

Dan

 

[SeaEagleRock8]

Eye Eye, Captain 👍

 

[Dan]

Eye Eye, Captain 👍

Winky face....not actually a wink, its just how I look now

 

[Dan]

May be good news for some, but advertising is currently broken.....

 

[Dan]

You may also all notice the switch over to the dark theme which runs with your system settings for light and dark mode.

There are some things I need to fix with the dark version but you can select it if you want as I know some people prefer this.

At the bottom of the screen you will see a small circle with half white, half black if you click on that it will allow you to choose "System" - Which will change colour as your system does to night mode etc
"light" - Our standard theme
"Dark" - Our dark version

They are all the same theme with different colour highlights but as I say needs some work on dark mode which I am working through now

 

[robbiea]

Love all this Maroon ,outstanding work Dan !

 

[Dan]

I enabled some caching which accounts for the errors because we have seen some really poor response times for the Time to first Byte lately I would be interested to hear other peoples experiences. I am actually considering moving to a whole new architecture if I can get that to speed up so please let me know how load timea and responsiveness of the site is.

 

[globaleagle]

Text to crayon help:

Time to first byte (TTFB) is a measurement used as an indication of the responsiveness of a webserver or other network resource.

 

[Carl]

I enabled some caching which accounts for the errors because we have seen some really poor response times for the Time to first Byte lately I would be interested to hear other peoples experiences. I am actually considering moving to a whole new architecture if I can get that to speed up so please let me know how load timea and responsiveness of the site is.

Using the samsung browser, I've found responsiveness to be generally good but unusable under high load. I often gave up after big games.

My main browser is Chrome but I stopped using it for this site some time ago. I can't remember why (see the how old are you survey post) but I think it was something to do with errors or freezes.

Not complaining. I'm glad we have this site. Just information.

 

[Carl]

Using the samsung browser, I've found responsiveness to be generally good but unusable under high load. I often gave up after big games.

My main browser is Chrome but I stopped using it for this site some time ago. I can't remember why (see the how old are you survey post) but I think it was something to do with errors or freezes.

Not complaining. I'm glad we have this site. Just information.

Ah, this site has a better memory than I do:

"
This site kept killing my tablet when I used it through Chrome. Restart, clear cache etc. Now I am using samsung internet just for this site and haven't had any more issues.
"

 

[Dan]

Using the samsung browser, I've found responsiveness to be generally good but unusable under high load. I often gave up after big games.

My main browser is Chrome but I stopped using it for this site some time ago. I can't remember why (see the how old are you survey post) but I think it was something to do with errors or freezes.

Not complaining. I'm glad we have this site. Just information.

Yeah that's a load issue with the CPU maxing out. I'm moving us to a higher CPU threaded server with higher frequency which should alleviate this. I'm also considering changing our stack from nginx and LEMP to openlitespeed and LOMP stack because as i see it a ttfb of 1.9s is horrible. I need to fix and improve caching to help with that but ultimately our database size and CPU are not fantastic.

Problem is I need to strike a balance between speed and cost

 

[Carl]

Yeah that's a load issue with the CPU maxing out. I'm moving us to a higher CPU threaded server with higher frequency which should alleviate this. I'm also considering changing our stack from nginx and LEMP to openlitespeed and LOMP stack because as i see it a ttfb of 1.9s is horrible. I need to fix and improve caching to help with that but ultimately our database size and CPU are not fantastic.

Problem is I need to strike a balance between speed and cost

I imagine cost is always going to be a big constraint.

I wouldn't have thought you'd have that much data to store but things like CPU, dynamic scaling and bandwidth would be issues.

 

[Mark from Brisbane]

Yeah that's a load issue with the CPU maxing out. I'm moving us to a higher CPU threaded server with higher frequency which should alleviate this. I'm also considering changing our stack from nginx and LEMP to openlitespeed and LOMP stack because as i see it a ttfb of 1.9s is horrible. I need to fix and improve caching to help with that but ultimately our database size and CPU are not fantastic.

Problem is I need to strike a balance between speed and cost

More Swahili

😂😂😂

 

[Dan]

I imagine cost is always going to be a big constraint.

I wouldn't have thought you'd have that much data to store but things like CPU, dynamic scaling and bandwidth would be issues.

Our database is 3gb plus and over 20 years old 🙂 the post table is the biggest at over gb

 

[eaglebuzz]

Ooft I don't like the new all maroon background! I live in Parra heartland, my odds of getting randomly assaulted on a bus just went up exponentially

 

[Dan]

More Swahili

😂😂😂

Come on Mark

LEMP = Linux Nginx (engine x) mysql (mariadb in our case) and PHP

We run a distro called centos which is basically an enterprise Linux derived from Red Hat. However it went to a stream version in 8 and that means our stack (centminmod) no longer works

The plan here is to move to Almalinux 9 mainly because of their package maintenance and downline and then test LOMP vs LEMP Lomp difference is that we swap the Web server component nginx for openlitespeed.

Generally speaking I just think the server we are on has some basic input and output issues dealing with our database etc and even caching just adds more strain to the CPU.

What that means is we need more CPU cores and at a higher frequency to help manage the amount of IO needed for the site.

The trade off is do you spend more, for more power or do you spend a little more and tune what you have?

 

[master blaster]

Squint protection is a lie....

Nah I was drilling some holes into the rolled aliminum beam on the outdoor deck. And some bits of metal had got behond my safety glasses and about 4 hours later stabbed into my eye. Let it go until it was too much to handle, went to GP, then optometrist, optometist found it but couldn't fix it, so he shuttled me to emergency because one bit was right near the centre and embedded in like a nail and starting to rust

Hope you feel better soon mate

 

[Mark from Brisbane]

Come on Mark

LEMP = Linux Nginx (engine x) mysql (mariadb in our case) and PHP

We run a distro called centos which is basically an enterprise Linux derived from Red Hat. However it went to a stream version in 8 and that means our stack (centminmod) no longer works

The plan here is to move to Almalinux 9 mainly because of their package maintenance and downline and then test LOMP vs LEMP Lomp difference is that we swap the Web server component nginx for openlitespeed.

Generally speaking I just think the server we are on has some basic input and output issues dealing with our database etc and even caching just adds more strain to the CPU.

What that means is we need more CPU cores and at a higher frequency to help manage the amount of IO needed for the site.

The trade off is do you spend more, for more power or do you spend a little more and tune what you have?

Bigger is always better ( apparently).

All good I’m only taking the piss, but it is another language.