Even worse this morning......not possible !!!

[Catalpa]

Just an idle question:

do you always work a 7-day week, Tim...

You really should get a house in France, open a bottle, put on some pink-tinged specs and live a little...

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

Not normally

That's a tempting plan though!

[Deimos]

Quote (Tim Stephenson): “Tuning these for our kind of traffic volume is a bit of a black art, and essentially requires plenty of patience and trial & error. In a nut shell, you make some estimates concerning file server load; configure the web servers & filer appropriately; monitor the situation to see if things get better or worse; adjust the settings appropriately and repeat until everything reaches a suitable level of stability.

In the age old fashion things may get a little worse before they get better, but the situation will be improving over the course of the morning.

”

That was over two weeks ago and yet its still “a disaster”. It this tuning still going on or has Archant lost interest is sorting out the performance problems with this site.

Seems to me we are forever being told that this, that or the other is being done and it will get better – BUT IT NEVER DOES. There is absolutely no reason why a forum of this size needs to run like a dog. It comes down to the capabilities of those responsible and after around a year (or more) and nothing has improved is anybody asking themselves any questions about why nothing is improving ?

[Deimos]

[quote]Deimos - now I'm really confused. I had problems for about three weeks or so during which period I had no control panel and no posters' names which was a pain when trying to follow the longer threads....[/quote]

My (and other people’s) problems is the performance of the system. Not a local thing on my computer/ISP/etc. but related to Archant’s infrastructure. They have been trying to resolve it for over a year now. On occasions the site is unusable and a lot of people who could make helpful contributions just go elsewhere.

We are continually promised improvements but they just never arrive. Its we are doing this, that or the other and things will soon be much better, then nothing happens, nothing improves and the performance is still useless.

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

With the exception of ongoing issues with this forum's search (which is the main reason it's about to be replaced) the vast majority of the performance and stability issues have been resolved.

Part of the problem has been that although you are only using this forum website, the same forum system is actually shared across 150 other websites - some with forums considerably larger than anything on this site. (See the Pinkun site at www.pinkun.com for an example with 80k posts in one forum). Unfortunately the current software simply cannot handle the level of traffic it's being exposed to, which has led to the issues observed on here and other sites. To give you an idea of scale, these sites generate something in the region of 60Gb of traffic a day, or around 2Tb of traffic over an average month.

It's unfortunately not an infrastructure problem, but a software problem. The underlying infrastructure is able to comfortably handle the current levels of traffic, with plenty of excess capacity.

To resolve these issues we're in the final stages of testing a new, more scalable forum system, which will replace the current system and has been successfully tested to limits well beyond predicted growth levels over the next few years.

I know this has been talked about for a few months, but unfortunately it does take time to implement, test and migrate to new systems. It wouldn't really be much of a problem if the system was only handling one forum with a few hundred or thousand posts but it does become more of a problem when you start talking about 80 sets of forums with 100's of thousands of posts.

[Ron Avery]

[quote]Deimos - now I'm really confused. I had problems for about three weeks or so during which period I had no control panel and no posters' names which was a pain when trying to follow the longer threads....[/quote]

Having no control panel and no posters' names is down to the settings on your PC and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Forum's performance.  Yes it is a pain that these elements disappear from time to time and are not integral in the site, but the loss of them is often a result of something changing on your PC rather than the Forum>  A means of recovery that seems to work is getting a PM from another member and saving those settings in your favourites.  I often wonder having looked at another user's set up when they moan about slow performance, how many other programmes, windows, phone lines or messenger services have they got open at the same time?

[Deimos]

[quote]Having no control panel and no posters' names is down to the settings on your PC and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Forum's performance. Yes it is a pain that these elements disappear from tim...[/quote]

Quote: “I often wonder having looked at another user's set up when they moan about slow performance, how many other programmes, windows, phone lines or messenger services have they got open at the same time?”

Such things could affect performance but would affect all internet sites and not only Living France. For me Living France is the ONLY internet site with such diabolical performance. They rest are generally fine. Whilst waiting for an LF page to appear I can still access other web sites with decent performance.

Whilst waiting for an LF page you can see there is not network activity going on so in my case it is certainly not a busy connection. Actually individual messenger services tend to use very little network bandwidth and system memory. I do not believe that messenger services and the like have “got it in for Living France”.

[Deimos]

[quote]With the exception of ongoing issues with this forum's search (which is the main reason it's about to be replaced) the vast majority of the performance and stability issues have been resolved.Part of ...[/quote]

Tim: You say that “the vast majority of the performance and stability issues have been resolved”. Yet in the same post you say “Unfortunately the current software simply cannot handle the level of traffic it's being exposed to”. So you are saying the performance has been solved AND that the system is not up to handling the load is is being subjected to !!! Both at the same time.

So do we have a problem or not. At times I am seeing absolutely unusable performance (several minutes to access a single page), yet you say there is no longer a performance issue.

We are still often seeing double postings, threads where older posts are always being shown as the end of the thread (e.g. this thread), etc. To be honest in my experience of this site nothing much has been resolved atall.

[Ex Forum Admin]

[quote]Tim: You say that “the vast majority of the performance and stability issues have been resolved”. Yet in the same post you say “Unfortunately the current software simply cannot handle the level of tr...[/quote]

Hi Deimos

I think what Tim is saying is that there are two issues, one with the servers and one with the performance of this particular software.

Both are being looked into at present and the use of new software coupled with improvements to the servers should help.

I am in the process of setting up the new software as we speak and starting to migrate the current data across. Once everything is set correctly we can go live with the new software (Community server software).

James

[Deimos]

I have now been trying to post a response for 1hr 25 mins. I eventually managed to get the page up to post the response, entered the text and pressed “post”. Waited for 10 mins but had to go out. Have now got home and its still trying to make the post !!!

So, Tim, problems with performance are sorted ??

How many people with valuable contributions to this forum are just giving up. I believe that not everybody would wit for 1hr 25 mins to post something to help somebody else.

I think things need to get improve. You need to get some professional IT people involved. I know they need to be paid a decent salary but you really do need them. Archant cannot go on blindly stumbling around. In the long term (or even in Archant’s case probably the sort term) employing some professionals will pay for itself many times over.

IAn

[Mochas]

Ron,

I don't believe that my computer settings had any bearing on the problems I experienced. I hadn't changed them before I encountered my problems, it was simply a case of one day everything was fine and the next time I signed in it wasn't.

Equally, after a three week interval suddenly everything reverted to normal, again without any form of intervention on my part. Like other people, while I was having difficulties with the LF website I had no problems with any of the other sites I looked at, some of which were one-offs but others I view often.

Surely, if my settings were at fault this would have affected at least some of these other sites?

As I indicated in my earlier post, I assumed that the Archant IT people had done something to correct for everybody whatever was causing the trouble in the first place.

[Hewitts]

I very rarely have any problems maybe because I am logging on in the middle of the night your time? However why is it sooo slow navigating from page to page? The slowest site I ever look at, you really have to put aside a decent amount of time if you want to follow threads.

[Loiseau]

Well I usually log on around 1 or 2am UK time (so almost down-under times!), and in the last week or more have almost never managed to connect to one of the topics in the forum. Or if I can actually get into one of the forum sections, then I can't call up the individual posts without getting an error message.

I have a broadband connection, and use the normal IE browser.

I visit various other forums (not necessarily France-related), and whatever I click on they are all pretty much instantaneous in their response.

Angela

www.the-vendee.co.uk