UFOPaedia Issue

[Pete]

Hi folks

 

You may have noticed that the UFOPaedia site is a bit broken at the moment. This seems to be a server issue, but combined with the world's flakiest software (MediaWiki) the results are spectacularly painful.

 

The server guys are looking into it, but I honestly have no idea why it isn't working at the moment I'll try and keep an eye on progress via my phone, but unfortunately I also have to leave the house now so this may take several hours before we get anywhere with it!

[Pete]

I finally managed to get it running again - had to disable a setting that up until now had been working, so no idea why it suddenly didn't.

 

The main thing is it's up and running again for now.

[Space Voyager]

STAY!

[Pete]

If I can find the time

 

At least I've finally purchased Enemy Within - only just having bought that yesterday gives you some idea of how busy I've been, normally I'd have been all over it on release day

[Pete]

Just to let you know, I've not forgotten about UFOPaedia. I've just moved StrategyCore to a new server as it has been facing stability issues for a while and am going to do some more tests on UFOPaedia on the new server too to see how it performs before migrating and upgrading.

 

Sadly this will be a bit of a mission and cause several hours of downtime during the final switchover, but thre's a lot more memory on the new server so it should run quicker and everything should behave better. With the new version comes some new spam-fighting abilities (which is why I've been trying to test the new version in the first place) so we'll see how it goes!

[Pete]

UFOPaedia is transferring to the new server at the moment. The files and database are in place, but the one thing I couldn't predict is an issue pointing the domain to the new server.

 

For some reason, the registrar won't let me point it to the new server and is giving me an incorrect error message, so unfortunately we now have to wait anywhere up to 3 hours for a response, all the while not allowing anyone to post on the site.

 

On the bright side, the WIKI is still clearly usable by people browsing it. The situation is not ideal, but bear with me (and the domain name registrar) and we should be sorted at some point today.

[NKF]

On the brighter side, we can take a short break from the pre-emptive blocks on suspicious spam-bots.

 

- NKF

[Hobbes]

On the brighter side, we can take a short break from the pre-emptive blocks on suspicious spam-bots.

 

- NKF

 

Time to reload the shotgun

[Pete]

Gah, I now realise there was a slightly different way to temporarily rectify the issue - you might have to wait a short while, flush browser cache or it may jsut work fine for you but I'm not looking at the site on the new server (the telltale sign will be that the green and red notices are gone).

 

Ideally I would have preferred not to have to do a workaround, but since it works and isn't technically "wrong" to do it this way, the domain name registrar can sort the other method out at their leisure

[Pete]

You'll be happy to hear that I've got around the largest hurdle in the way of upgrading. There is a bug in the software that is in the latest versions that tries to clear the job log (essentially a list of things for the server to tidy up) and causes page load times to be pretty intolerable - more than a minute.

 

I've found that setting the number of cleared jobs each page load to zero and getting the server to clear them periodically via other means increases page load times to the speed of the current version, if not marginally faster (though that may be in my mind ).

 

I need to do another test upgrade knowing what I now know, but it means I can finally upgrade at some point in the next few days.