Remember that what has happened over February – where we started off with a huge mess because scheduled maintenance tasks for the end of the week AND the end of the month all came in on the same day and upset the system. Fixing that took some time.
And before and after that event the board was only intermittently troublesome; we had stretches where it wasn’t happening much or at all. It is very difficult to find a problem when the board is operating smoothly. You would report your problem, I’d send it upstairs, they’d sign on and find … nothing. What are you going to do with that?
Looking back performance did go downhill over February, culminating in this week’s really hard time and finally a fix. It was only when it did get so hideous that this could be properly diagnosed.
IIRC Discourse has 1 or 2 levels of nesting? This nitpick aside, its selling point, as it were, is that it’s free, open-source mailing list/forum software. Absolutely no idea how it scales to millions of posts (though that does not count as a lot these days? And Postgres is a project with some decades behind it.)
For threads, no nesting at all. Newest post goes on the bottom. You can see it in action at the new NaNoWriMo forums, but it should be noted that they had to move the boards to the Discourse servers because their usual servers couldn’t handle the load.
It’s also the forum by the guy who came here and asked us for what we wanted or would find useful in a forum, then told us none of it was stuff he’d implement because it wasn’t what other people had said they wanted or needed. He even specifically said he did not expect current forum users who liked the way older forums worked to be interested in his new software.
Someone said it lacks subforums, which are kinda important here. Tags won’t cut it for the Pit, for example. I also note it pushes community moderation with voting and all that stuff, which doesn’t tend to be liked here. It even has “levels” of users where what a user is allowed to do is based on how long they’ve been on the forum. (even if you think the forum needs likes, those are rationed by your poster level!)
None of this seems compatible with the SDMB and what its users want in a forum. It seems more like a complete reinvention of the forum than replacement forum software.
TubaDiva, I get that sometimes there’s nothing to report, but if you could just post a quick note saying so when Dopers are complaining, it’d help keep frustration from reaching “I quit” levels. It may seem like we should assume that you know and are addressing the issues, but when a frustrating situation continues for days or weeks, people inevitably start to question if anyone’s listening.
I will do my best but when people are frustrated if I tell them I have nothing to tell them they’re not comforted by that.
NOT complaining about that; people are entitled to their feelings, especially when we are not giving them the best experience. I’m not saying they don’t.
Managing expectations is not so easy but I will see if I can’t find a better balance.
Sorry, don’t remember specifically. I’ll be more specific if I feel the need to report things again.
I think it was about early evening PST, so later evening (probably before midnight) Chicago time, so probably consistent with kenobi 65’s post just above.
TubaDiva, thank you for your thoughtful response to my post. I don’t think of myself as cynical and pessimistic, nor am I without hope, so if I came across that way, I assume I expressed myself badly.
I was lucky enough at my newspaper to survive multiple layoffs over 12 years to reach retirement, and the paper itself turned a corner several years ago to where they are marginally in the black now. Also the parent company had very deep pockets and were determined for the paper to survive. So I have some experience with non-negative outcomes. I like it here. I will be keeping my eyes open for opportunities to help it to continue.
Just looked at the log; there are a bunch of housecleaning tasks scheduled around 9:45-10:00 pm Chicago time. And then another batch around 1:00 am.
I don’t know why they split them up like that – I’m guessing this is trying to balance the load or something, I don’t know for sure – but that probably accounts for your hiccup.
I hope we don’t have a lot of that. Or any of that, really, and I’m sorry to hear you had it.
Please keep me posted if you see this again. Note the time so I can try to find some reason for it.
I don’t think 10-11pm is really late enough. It would be better to schedule them on other days during the early morning, if at all possible. I note that I’m often up then, and have never seen any board problems overnight. It’s always during the day. So there would seem to be more headroom at night.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but as expected, it appears that the fix was only temporary. In trying to reply to this thread to say that I’ve noticed a few slowdows in the past few days but they have been rare and not produced errors, I just got a 504 Gateway Timeout at 11:04 AM EST.
ETA: On the positive side, most of the time the system is still running well.
