Will be shutting the site down at midnight eastern tonight (12/7) for server work

[Steve St.Laurent]

We have had an HUGE increase in traffic to the site which is causing slow performance problems. Daily traffic has increased 60% over what it was only 2 weeks ago. I will be shutting the site down at midnight eastern time tonight to reconfigure the servers. Right now they are setup in a backup arrangement where the site runs on one server and the other one sits there as a continuous backup so that if something happens on the primary server I can just switch over to the other server in a matter of minutes. The traffic volume has grown to the point where we need both servers to handle the site.



I will be doing part of that conversion tonight. I was planning on flying to Atlanta in January to make this change but the recent huge increase in traffic has made it necessary to try to get it done earlier. It will be very difficult for me to fly down there before the holidays so I am going to do what I can online and finish it up in January.



I'm not sure how long the site will be down - it could possibly be down overnight. I apologize for any inconvenience this causes and I will try to have it back up as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[Yo Hoot]

Good news... hope the membership grows too!

 

[DLBurns]

GREAT NEWS!!!!

Thanks for the effort Steve, the site has really been bogging down the last few weeks!!

Dave

 

[juicedcummins]

Good luck Steve, hope you get it sorted out.

 

[bmoeller]

Thanks for all the hard work Steve.

 

[Bob Wagner]

Steve thank you for all your effrots, we all appreciate it

 

[DEickhoff]

Good luck Steve. I work with servers at work and know what a pain in the ***** they can be. Hope all things work out. Just for the record the site does not seem slow to me and I'm in Kodiak with a 1200ms delay (satellite jumps).



Dawna

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Just finished and got it online - don't you guys ever sleep? I had 77 users online within minutes of finishing after the site had been down for 3 hours! We're now utilitizing both servers to process the website. One server just handles the web pages and your connections. The other server is solely serving up the databases. There will be some tuning required still because the systems are running completely different than they were but I don't expect that we should have any performance issues now - we'll see. I'll still be flying down to Atlanta to setup some emergency backup scenarios so that if one server goes down I can get the site up on one even if that means slow performance - it's better than nothing.



Everything went pretty smoothly considering the amount of work that needed to be done. If you get any errors let me know as I had to edit a ton of files.

 

[Yo Hoot]

So far with a cople clicks it does seem faster.

 

[R-N-R]

Steve,

Your continuous efforts are greatly appreciated!!!



Bill

 

[AMink]

Mine only slowed every once in while before... . seems really quick now. Thanks for the all nighter, Steve!Oo. You must have an in-house Starbucks!

 

[rkressg]

Steve,

Thanks for all the had work. It seems to be running quicker with the first few clicks. Glad to see that site usership is up. Hope this solution is good for a while.

-Rich

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

I won't know for sure how it's working until tonight when we hit our peak loads. So far the servers are just loafing along again. This should double our capacity.

 

[DPelletier]

Thanks Steve,



get some sleep, eh!



Dave