The Flat Earth Society
The Flat Earth Society => Announcements => Status Notices => Topic started by: xasop on December 06, 2014, 05:57:58 AM
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The forum, wiki and IRC will be going offline for about five minutes on 2014-12-13, between 08:00 and 08:15 UTC.
For convenience, this means:
EST (USA east coast):
2014-12-13, 03:00-03:15
UTC (UK):
2014-12-13, 08:00-08:15
AEDT (Australia east coast):
2014-12-13, 19:00-19:15
The intent is to install security updates on the server which hosts the forum, wiki and IRC. These will be non-disruptive to functionality, as the server is running a stable OS release that gets critical fixes only.
Additionally, the opportunity will be taken to perform some tuning on the forum database server, which has been running on default settings since this website was set up; and to migrate the wiki off SQLite, which it was originally configured with. We now have enough real data and traffic that it is worth looking at what tuning is required to make the website run smoothly.
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And we're done. We didn't convert the wiki off SQLite, simply because we need a bit more planning in order to do it properly and we didn't want to do a hacky job that would come back to bite us later. The forum database has been tuned up, though.
Thanks for flying Flat Earth Society!
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Thanks for improving things I don't understand. I'm sure they'll help me in ways I don't realise and I have no suspicion at all that these scheduled stops aren't a hoax to make it look like we are getting all kinds of improvements that I'll never notice.
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Thanks for improving things I don't understand. I'm sure they'll help me in ways I don't realise and I have no suspicion at all that these scheduled stops aren't a hoax to make it look like we are getting all kinds of improvements that I'll never notice.
As long as people keep not noticing anything, I'm satisfied that things are running as smoothly as planned. When people start to notice problems, that's when I worry.
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Thanks for improving things I don't understand. I'm sure they'll help me in ways I don't realise and I have no suspicion at all that these scheduled stops aren't a hoax to make it look like we are getting all kinds of improvements that I'll never notice.
To keep it short and simple: keeping the server up to date reduces our chances of a security breach. As Parsifal said, the only way you'd notice something related to that is if something went very, very wrong.
Tuning the database management system can make things ever so slightly faster, but the main goal is making sure that as our traffic increases, things don't slow down. Personally, I've noticed things speeding up slightly, but the maintenance coincided with me travelling to another country, so part of what I'm seeing could be due to me changing ISPs for the time being.
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To keep it short and simple: keeping the server up to date reduces our chances of a security breach. As Parsifal said, the only way you'd notice something related to that is if something went very, very wrong.
Tuning the database management system can make things ever so slightly faster, but the main goal is making sure that as our traffic increases, things don't slow down.
Pretty much. Both of these will be particularly important post-reunification, as we'll have the combined traffic of two forums.
Personally, I've noticed things speeding up slightly, but the maintenance coincided with me travelling to another country, so part of what I'm seeing could be due to me changing ISPs for the time being.
The placebo effect can also be very powerful. (http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Confessions-The-Soft-CPU-Upgrade)