Can't we get it straight?

[Marley23]

@Bob Ducca

Yeah, I’m fully gripped. Not sure why the condescending reply was called for, but whatever.

I don’t think it was all that condescending, and you were posting some uninformed and rather pointless speculation. That really doesn’t help anybody. Why encourage anybody to worry that the board is going away when there’s zero reason to think so? Quoting Ed Zotti from a couple of weeks ago:

@Ed_Zotti

Rising board traffic (currently ~14M pageviews/mo) coupled with the increasing frequency of outages, error messages and other glitches has led the STM tech staff to conclude we’ve outgrown our current server capacity. We’re getting estimates and investigating alternatives and I expect we’ll upgrade once all the info is in. Till then we request your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

[cochrane]

It sounds like they’re taking a page from “So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish.”

[GrandWino]

@Marley23

I don’t think it was all that condescending, and you were posting some uninformed and rather pointless speculation. That really doesn’t help anybody. Why encourage anybody to worry that the board is going away when there’s zero reason to think so?

If posters are no longer allowed to post uninformed speculation, that should cut the server overload issues way down.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Senegoid

So, assume at least that the board is not losing money. But that’s not necessarily good enough. What is the opportunity cost of maintaining this board? That is, how much more revenue could the owners pull in if they put the same resources to other uses? What does it cost to run this board? Server hardware, electric costs, maintenance costs, paid staff costs, storage costs, internet connectivity costs, hamster feed, . . . ? Could the owners put those same costs and resources to a more profitable use? It is good business for the owners to continue this board?

I may be talking out of my ass, but I don’t think it’s that bad. The costs may not be all that much. The paid staff is minimal; I think only Ed Zotti and TubaDiva are paid, and they’re not even full-time. Internet connectivity costs and storage costs I imagine are not very much; the site is entirely text, so there’s not much bandwidth involved and even the entire database is probably only a few gigabytes. Management at Sun-Times Media may look at this site as a growth opportunity. Going paid-member-only would be a mistake, as that would drastically reduce page views.

[Marley23]

@Bob Ducca

If posters are no longer allowed to post uninformed speculation, that should cut the server overload issues way down.

In other words we’d benefit two different ways. In the meantime, please think carefully about what you’re saying. There’s no reason to think it’s even possible, so encouraging people to worry about it is really not the way to go. We apologize again for the trouble.

@Senegoid

We don’t know what interest or commitment that new owner may have to continue running this board.

And since we don’t know, let’s get busy worrying based on nothing. Is that the general concept? I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. Ed Zotti posted two weeks ago that management was getting estimates on new servers because demand is too high for what we have now. That’s more factual than ‘there’s been a change of ownership and maybe they’ll want a busy and growing board to go away because Idunno.’

[Inner_Stickler]

Marley, you tricky devil.

[Dallas_Jones]

I am running Fiddler, a debugging program for Windows. When I get these board crash events I get the following sort of statements. Sorry, Fiddler doesn’t seem to allow me to paste it’s message, or I don’t yet know how. Here is the message from a crash a few minutes ago:

#1042 The Server did not return properly formatted HTTP Headers. HTTP headers should be terminated with CRLFCRLF. These were terminated with LFLF.

#2605 Incorrectly formed response headers.
Missing Header name #8,:

#4327 Content-Length mismatch: Response Header indicated 4387 bytes, but server sent 4407 bytes.

Not quite sure what this means, maybe a resident geek can translate.

[Marley23]

Copying Jerry’s announcement:

@jdavis

The message boards are going to be taken down tonight (Friday, June 14th) starting at 1 AM CDT. The master database is going to be taken out of service to be thoroughly checked and possibly repaired. While that is occurring the message board will be unavailable. Expected downtime is 4 to 6 hours so the message board will not be available again until some time on Friday morning.

This is the first step in a series of steps we are taking to address the current functionality issues. While tonight the master database is being worked on there are multiple replicated slave databases used by the system as well. They will also need to be checked and possibly repaired. Those checks can occur while the message board remains online and will occur from Friday night throughout the weekend. While any of the slave databases are offline there will be some degradation in performance.

In tandem to this work on the underlying vBulletin databases we’ll be rebuilding the various internal vBulletin caches and indices. Due to the size of the database this process can take quite a while and I do not have an estimate yet on when that work will be completed. It will be in the range of days though not hours.

At this point we have not determined the root cause of the functionality problems so it’s unknown if tonight’s upcoming database work will lead to some resolutions of the issues. It is a first step in a process that will eventually lead to a resolution.

Finally, waiting in the wings is a new front end web server to replace what is currently being used. Right now the front end server is on 3 year old hardware. The new server is a current operating system build and new software stack that should provide performance benefits to what we see today. Testing is ongoing. It will be installed sometime in the next few weeks. As for the back end database we believe it has more than enough horsepower. The SDMB database shares resources on a 64 core 5 server database cluster running with SSD storage technology. The SDMB database usage averages about 4 cores of utilization under normal load and can peak up to 11 cores so there is of headroom on the back end.