Maintenance

[Carl]

Sorry everyone, the upload had to be done twice due to an error, and Time Warner really needs to improve our upload speeds!

That said, I should've said longer than 10 minutes for SURE and am very sorry.

It would appear everything is back to normal. It takes about 25 minutes to upload nearly 7 years worth of posts by the way!

[Carl]

Sometime in the overnight hours - maybe tomorrow morning - I will need to put the forum into maintenance mode once more. This will take a bit longer, and may result in timeouts and/or blank pages/random errors for a time. This will not happen for at least 4-6 hours from now and maybe longer.

When this happens, if you cannot reach us at carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/ you can try http://www.carlsguides.com/ to at least get status updates.

People not in the US/EU are going to naturally be more prone to issues when this happens, due to implications out of my control. New IPs take time to propagate around the world and some areas will take longer than others.

I will be reachable through our Sims 4 Facebook page as well as [email protected] should you still have trouble into tomorrow evening. All goes well on my end and with the spread of the new IP, it should be over by then

[Carl]

Migration complete. Now I've just got some little bugs to work out, I'm sure. I am not even yet aware of any - just positive there will be some!

Thanks for your patience, and please report any issues to me.

[Carl]

Will fix email notices as soon as I can

[Carl]

OK! It looks like I'm done at least for now, as the mail is working just fine and is delivered quickly. There might be some glitchiness, and I'm sure a few things will go wrong the next 24. Let me know here 

I changed hosts, as I was overpaying for services and missing out on the ability to scale the server up/down on demand. I can go from 12GB RAM (what we need) to 100 in about 5 minutes if I need to! We were also almost out of space on the disks too! :O I've wanted all of that a long time, and finally have it.

Also you should note that emails that come from us are no longer 'insecure' and won't have that scary red lock on them when using gmail. Not that simple notifications from a forum really need encryption, but google is pushing people to do this for good reason I suppose. Here and there PMs might be intercepted without encryption, and I reckon sometimes that's private enough to warrant it

[Carl]

I'd promised I wouldn't do a server move like I just did, but feel like it had a minimal impact on users since I did it overnight. Things seem normal, though some people further from the US may not have the new address. They'll get it within the day I am sure. I have some kinks to iron out with the bad gateway errors but should get it fixed soon.

This is nerdy of me but I have to share how great this is with my fellow geeks here and just why it was worth all that work. I started the server with less power to see how it'd go with a fresh build, but it was quickly using up most of the processor as you can see in the image below. By 4PM EST (when we typically peak) it would have taken up all the power we had and started slowing, big time:



I took us offline all of 3 minutes and gave it 4 more processor cores, and the usage dropped substantially as you can see in the right side of the image. It is now to a level where we will not need to reboot again like that until Summer, and then for just a few moments. This was a great reason to move - cost savings from not paying for one-size-fits-all server all year, and much more scale-able to meet demands. May 30, I can give it a bit more juice, and drop it back down in September. Flip flop around and do it again in December! Such good stuff, and with less than 5 minutes of broken sites! 

Being able to avoid the server stuttering any time I want is great, and I can also see exactly how things are going at a glance. I'm in love. I want the Forum and all my sites to work as well as possible. I'm also installing something that is going to auto-shrink images when viewed on mobile, but we'll see how it goes. I would like to save people bandwidth by delivering them more efficiently.. if it works out.

Thank you @Jon for suggesting I get away from that overpriced company. I don't regret it one bit.

The last 3 months, I've spent more time working on the server than I have writing. Making guides is what I enjoy. I've gained some freedom from annoyances and constant problems today, and I'm really glad the work paid off.

[Metropolis Man]

Great work, Carl!

[grimsoul]

Just wanted to let you know that what changes you made has, at least for me, made the site a lot faster. The forums have always done fairly well for me but but the main site usually took awhile to load but now it's loaded up about as soon as I click on the link. Even the pages with several pictures on them.

[Nettlejuice]

I have been tying to access the forum all day, this pops up on Chrome: 500 Internal Server Error. No problems with Microsoft Edge. Any ideas how to fix this please?

[Carl]

I have been tying to access the forum all day, this pops up on Chrome: 500 Internal Server Error. No problems with Microsoft Edge. Any ideas how to fix this please?

@Nettlejuice This was really frustrating, to have my hands tied on this and yet forget to tell anyone  It is just your browser cache (clear cached files), it's trying to get files from the wrong spot, and it reacts very badly to something missing We lost a lot of traffic to that problem today. I was able to make it refresh on the guide but couldn't figure out how to force browser refresh on the forum before I had to crash out. Always some kind of problem left over after a big move like this, real sorry for the inconvenience. Had I thought of it, I'd have put *something* up to help you guys.

@grimsoul Really good to hear, that was the goal! Because of the above problem I also had to turn off compression and certain optimizations, so it should be even faster once we can assure people are not caching the wrong pieces of the puzzle. The network, memory, everything is better and is what I'd hoped for

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm really sorry to anyone who had this browser cache issue. I will put up a notice on the guide on how to access it in case someone still can't get in.

How-To: Clear your browser's cache
http://help.ea.com/en/article/clearing-your-browsers-cache/

Edit: thanks Mrsflynn for slipping that link in. I put news up on the site. What I meant by my hands being tied, is I can only RECOMMEND the browser cache things for 1 second to try to fix it, but cannot tell it what to do. Really should've put news up but was just a bit brain-drained after tinkering with it for quite a while. Ready to tackle new problems so things will be working well when we get new Sims content.

[Carl]

Kept the title - see my post above if you have any issues viewing any of the sites. They are working, and your browser cache may be the problem.

I just installed a module that dynamically resizes images, compresses files, and generally does cool 'stuff' to speed up the sites. I do not 100% know how this will affect a forum, though it appears to be working fine. In testing it's given us at least another 10% bump in speed (over the nearly doubled increase from moving servers). Since I cannot visit every page here, some issues may have been missed and you'd be helping me a lot to let me know of them

I'll need to move all images to the main server for it to fully take effect. Old gallery images are safe but will take a loooong time to upload because they're around 15GB.

Let me know if you have any trouble, I hope that people on mobile notice a difference in the loading speed. You will also use less bandwidth loading pages. While I cannot make ads a non-issue on the guide-side, spending less time downloading the page resources should make them at least a bit more manageable.

Hopefully this is the end of my adventures with servers and things of the like. I've moved about 5x in the decade I've been doing this, and spent many days working on configurations, bot attacks, and things of that nature when I'd prefer to be writing. So I'm a happy man this morning and off to play some Dark Souls! I'll watch my inbox for any notifications of new posts and will address anything that is wrong as fast as I can. Thank you all for being so cool about the downtimes we've had this past week. I will not choose to do this again for a long, long time!

[Deklitch]

Carl, does

I'll need to move all images to the main server for it to fully take effect.

mean we can't store images off site any more? Will there be a new solution for using images in stories? Or do we continue to save images elsewhere (in my case my own website) and link to them from the forum?

If there is going to be a new way of storing/using images in stories, how much time will we have to move our images to the new method, and what do you want us to do to meet the new needs.

If I''m panicking without any need to panic, or reading something into this that shouldn't be read into it, please accept my apologies, I just want to make sure I'm doing my part to assist you in your process to make the forum as user friendly as possible for those on mobile devices.

Dek

[Carl]

Oh, sorry for causing confusion. It will not affect off-site image hosting.

We had a gallery program once for hosting images here, and I kept all images because they're used in old stories - I'd ruin dozens of them if I lost those pictures. I just need to move those, as well as the guide's images to the new server so that the optimization can work. The images are still on a small server I made just for hosting that type of file and have yet to move them.

Time Warner's net speeds are awful.

I'd guess that most of the image hosting companies do their own optimizations to prevent them using too much bandwidth. It won't affect them in any way, as far as I know

[Deklitch]

Oh thanks for that, Carl, explains it perfectly.

[Carl]

Glad you asked as I may ramble a bit sometimes and wouldn't want anyone to think something that major was changing!