The Gathering

Last friday, Oct 12th, this forum was moved to a new server with more capacity and stability. Last months the forum was sometimes responding slow or giving 'internal server errors'. That should be solved now!

Unfortunately, some settings of the new server were not configured right and a part of the data was missing. Due to this topics were not always accessible (or required a refresh of your browser), and functions like PM's, search, and viewing profiles of users didn't work at all. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. These problems are now corrected and I've restored a backup of Oct 12th 2007, which was just made before moving to the new server. Due to the errors only a few post were made the last couple of days, so it shouldn't be a big problem that those posts are lost.

If you still experience errors, please let me know! Reply to this topic or send me an e-mail (martijn @ cyclingcolours.nl) . First try if it helps to empty cache/cookies of your browser.

That's fine!

Thank you Martijn!!

So?

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Love, despite what they tell you, does not conquer all, nor does it even usually last. In the end the romantic aspirations of our youth are reduced to, whatever works.

Μέχρι να φανεί το φως
δρόμους θα διαβαίνω
όχι πως σε ξέχασα
μα δε σε προσμένω.

So you really think you are capable of owning and maintaining a forum?

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you own me...

yeah I think you're right Petros.. let's just close the forum, not fight with the host provider and not do anything for the fans.. Seriously.. if you find it such a hassle to come her,e why do you bother anyway?

Martijn manages this forum fro free on volunteering basis... I think he deserves some credit for that. If there are problems, well there are problems..
I dunno if you noticed but the gathering website, hosted on another server by another company, on another continent (just to make clear there is no link between forum and website problems) also got offline a couple of times this months...
I'm doing my best to push the people to get things fixed as fast as possible, but a server cracks down or a technician fucks up, it's still easier to blame Martijn right?

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Maybe i'm paranoid, yeah that's my problem
You almost have to be when you look like me

As you probably have noticed, the database server was not responding since yesterday evening. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Two weeks ago, Oct 12th, the database server was moved from a shared environment to a more private server. Because it was likely that this was the bottleneck for the slow performance in the past. Since this movement to this new server, the speed of the forum has increased significantly. But because this private server is a new kind of service, there may be bugs and some optimalisation is required.

In the beginning my hosting provider set up te new database wrong and incomplete (total size of database is 600MB). That's why the forum was down or partly working untill this was repaired on Oct 17th.

Last week (Oct 24th) and yesterday (Oct 27th) the new server became unresponsive. I can not reboot the server myself yet, but that option will become available soon, to reduce the downtime if this problem (or something else) may occur again. It's not clear yet was caused the downtime of Oct 24th/27th. Together with the support team / administrators of the hosting company, we're looking into this failure, in order to prevent it from happening again in future. According to the statistics, it doesn't seem to be a memory problem.

I hope that the hosting company finds the causes soon, otherwise I may have to look for another company to host my fansite & forum/chat.

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Cycling Colours, a The Gathering fansite http://www.cyclingcolours.nl
news, live photo's, setlists, cd-reviews, interviews, links

You could just say "No".

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you own me...

or say you're a real deep pain in the ass... (feel free to contact another mod to get me censored...)
Seriously, the situation is not 100% ok, but it's far better than 3/4 weeks ago..

But of course, you'll only see the down side of it...
After the database problems are solved, you'll still complain that the colours aren't right for TG, or you'll find something to keep nagging... without making any suggestion...

_________________
Maybe i'm paranoid, yeah that's my problem
You almost have to be when you look like me

hann mais lol



no problem Martijn. I didn't notice anything.
glad the forum works fine.

cheers.

When i contacted any mod to get someone censored? If i'm the pain,who is the ass? You?

For the rest again blah blah blah. Everything is ok,i'm the problem.

The suggestion is done to the greek forum,to take the (very heavy according to the past massive deletings) greek database and go to a new domain.

_________________
you own me...

Let's explain it once more...

The old forum (untill August 2007) became larger and larger. The database daily grows with about 0,6MB. Due to this the respons of the forum (over time; years, months) slowly became slower and slower, and above a threshold value this is expressed more strong. And besides this 'internal server errors' occured frequently. At max the size of the database has been 920MB and consuming a bandwith of 20GB/month.

During the last months several different actions were taken, step by step, to improve the speed and stability of the forum. Here's a (not complete) brief summary.

1) Optimizing tables of database.

2) Several shared servers (within same hosting company) were compared. All had similar respons times (minimal differences).

3) Upgrading forum software, from phpBB2 to (release candidate of) phpBB3. phpBB3 is better optimized for larger forums and has improved performance over phpBB2. phpBB3 has more optimized code and it caches template, styles, and some data to speed things up.

4) Reducing size of database, with 25%. By deleting 70.000 of the oldest posts. These oldest posts were rarely viewed any more (not increading post counts for a long time). More than 95% of the posts users are viewing are new of recent (last few months) posts. So the oldest posts will hardly be missed by majority of the users.

5) Temporarily the search function was disabled and bots/spiders of search engines (Google, Yahoo, ...) were blocked. Both used up to 50% of the database queries.

These (1-5, and other actions) did improve the respons speed of the forum a little bit, let's say a factor two, but that was not enough.

6) Two weeks ago the database was moved from a shared environment to a more private server, with more capacity and stability.
This should strongly reduce the moments that the server is responding very slow, and may even increase the speed in general (which is the case). Didn't you noticed that all pages of the forum are displayed faster than ever!?
Besides the speed, also the stability should increase. In past often 'internal server errors' occured. I haven't seen (or reported by users) this error yet. The only error which occured (twice last week) caused the server to crash. Due to the time difference between Europe and USA, and the busy support team it took 24 hours before the server was running again. This is much much longer than what I would like it to be. Of course I complained about this; since today (but I don't want to test this when it's not necessary, because the forum will be down for one minute if everything works as it should) I'll be able to reboot the server myself! So if such a crash would happen again in future, the forum will be back online much faster (within a minute from the moment I notice the forum is down). We're still looking to what happend last week, in order to be able to prevent it from happening again. As I told before, this new server is a new service which may still contain some bugs or require optimalisation, but this stability will be better in future! So stay tuned and be patient if something is not working 100%.
And because this server has much more capacity, this makes it less (or likely not at all) necessary to prune (delete) old posts in future.

Finally,
the respons speed and stability are my first priority. As soon as the forum is running correctly again, of course the basic blue colour will be replaced by a The Gathering skin (I'm already working on that backstage).

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Cycling Colours, a The Gathering fansite http://www.cyclingcolours.nl
news, live photo's, setlists, cd-reviews, interviews, links