[SOLVED] Forum instability ✅

[andrew]

Since migrating to a new (bigger, faster) server with a new hosting company, we have been experiencing an unfortunate problem with the forum software crashing with increasing frequency. As of yet, we have not identified the problem, or a fix.

A decision regarding switching back to the former company will be made soon (likely within 24 hours). The good news is that they cut their prices in half withina week after the transition. The bad news is that we would have happily avoided a lot of extra work and headache if we had known about the price change in time.

Thank you for your patience. We share your frustration.

[alexander (Alexander Meander)]

@andrew, thanks for the update. i am glad to hear the issue is getting close to some sort of resolution. i feel like every time i found some time to hang out here for a bit lately, the site was down.

i hope it all has not proven to be incredibly stressful for you. if so, drink some warm bone broth

[andrew]

Pulled the trigger and migrated back to the previous hosting company. I wish I had some bone broth (or stronger)!

Forum Server Migration

Well folks, things went downhill with the server after things had been going so well. After weeks of an issue we couldn’t track down, we migrated back to the previous hosting company. As luck would have it, they cut their prices in half like a week after we switched in the first place, largely due to price. Ha! So we’re back to a few tweaks needing to be done to get things perfect, but hopefully we’re on a better path.

[Ragnar (BenSpiritbear)]

Just got on and looks good so far and I was actually able to get on so that’s a big plus.

[andrew]

In the 2 months since my last update on this thread, some nagging issues remained. In response, I have spent a considerable amount of time bringing myself up to speed on current methods of running web servers. That has resulted in rebuilding the servers from the ground up, and moving from a monolithic setup to fully containerized setup.

If you’re lucky, that’s meaningless gobbledygook. If we’re all lucky, it means things should be more stable moving forward.

We’ve been operating at almost 99.5% uptime for the past week, and that 0.5% of downtime can mostly be explained by the few minutes here and there when the new changes were being applied.

As well, unbeknownst to me, much of the content was missing from the main website due to a broken connection between Wordpress and the forums. That has been linked back up as well.

Also, I have set up a monitoring system which alerts me to issues (rather than waiting for user reports). That can be found at: https://status.feralculture.com/

There are a couple more upgrades I hope to implement in the coming month. Fingers crossed that I’ve gotten so good at this is that all you’ll feel is faster page loads and 100% uptime. Bwhahahahaha…

[andrew]

Forums were down for a few minutes today. They should have been offline for less than 5 minutes due to a planned upgrade. However, that upgrade failed the first time. It appears that the upgrade completed successfully on the 2nd attempt, and we should be good to go.