What the heck just happened to the site? Let me tell you...

So, as you can tell, the site crashed a few minutes ago, and now anything that was posted since the site went live this morning has disappeared. Here's the story:

The transfer to the new hardware went as well as can be expected with just a few normal hiccups and glitches. The site went live again and Jin was chasing down the last of the bugs and incorrect database tables. The early problems were fading, the site was humming again, and then....The main drive on the new hardware failed.

This had nothing to do with the site, nothing to do with the programmers, and nothing to do with the co-location move. It was simply just very VERY bad luck. It's pretty much exactly the same as if the drive on your home computer crashed and you lost everything. So we had to go to a backup, which was created at 5pm EST yesterday (Tuesday, Dec 18th).

Yes, it sucks, we're all bummed and apologize for the inconvenience. But it was really out of our hands, we were just very unlucky.

New hardware is operational!

Photo.net is back up and running on the new hardware. This is a very good thing:

-New hardware
-Faster processor speed and much more memory in the database server
-More accessible (and physically cooler) server location

Next steps are to make sure everything is running as it should (please report any bugs you find) and to optimize the new hardware as much as possible. Then we will collect all the old hardware and see what is still useful out of it to add into the newer stuff in terms of additional servers and whatnot (getting a little bit over my head technically here). After we've done all that, we can take a look at what performance improvement we have seen and decide if additional new hardware needs to be purchased.

Onward and upward!


Image by photo.net member Jeremy Stein

Photo.net is "read only" for a hardware upgrade...

As you can see by the big red notice on top of every photo.net page, the site is in "read-only" mode for the next 14 hours or so. We estimate this to be from 5:00pm (EST) on Tuesday (today) until 7:00am (EST) Wednesday (tomorrow).

We are moving to a better server location and much newer hardware. This is one of the steps that we are taking to improve site performance. As I have said before, there is no one magic thing we can do to eliminate the problems, but this is a big move in the right direction.

I will update this post with any progress information that I get, and with a little luck, we'll be back online tomorrow morning with no problems.

UPDATE #1:
9:30pm (EST): The database export is about 75% done.

UPDATE #2:
12:15am (EST): Database export is completely done. The drives are being physically moved from the old to new location.

UPDATE #3:
2:00am (EST) Everything loaded and ready for testing.

UPDATE #4:
10:15am (EST) Back up once again.

Slow site performance over the past day and a half...

Yes, the site has been slower than usual over the past 36-48 hours. Here are the reasons why:

1. We are carrying out some database work in preparation for a hardware move to a new server location (and new hardware). That's putting some ongoing load on the database.

2. Thursday night-friday morning (depending on your time zone) is the time we do our weekly scheduled backup. The move to the new server hardware/location will help make these backups less noticeable in the future. But they are a fact of life, we HAVE to back up the site.

3. Also not helping is that we occasionally find people trying to download forum content en masse for whatever reason. We had one this morning, which Jin blocked.

Slideshow function improved

We've made some improvements to the slide show feature on photo.net. I think users will like the improved functionality. There are also now "slide show" links next to folder names in a user's portfolio view.