Ketogenic Forums still often not accessible

(Todd Allen) #1

I’ve seen a few posts about the system being down such as for lack of disk space and the problem being fixed. But instead of getting better it seems like the forums are not accessible as much if not more than before. Anyone know the story? Crazed hacker veganspiracy?

#2

Damn Vegans DDoSing the site!

Definitely seems to be getting worse all the time though. I’ve also noticed I’m getting a lot of internal server errors when posting and have to constantly reload pages.

#3

I got an email this morning that I think went out to Patreon folks:

It seems that our server is having problems. We are looking into fixing it. My apologies.

Richard

(Katie the Quiche Scoffing Stick Ninja ) #4

I work in IT, it doesn’t take 4 days to fix, lol.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

Richard says that the server on which the forum is hosted is having trouble. Unfortunately, he is in the middle of final exams and has no time to deal with it. He will be upgrading the hardware in a couple of weeks, once he has time. In the meantime, we’ll all just have to cope, sorry!

(Katie the Quiche Scoffing Stick Ninja ) #6

I very much hope he upgrades to a cloud based server if he’s not already on one ;>

#8

Best wishes for the exams Richard. :grinning:

#9

Stole the words outta my mouth!

#10

Probably runs Windows :laughing: He should just snapshot the forum, slap it up on a VPS temporarily and re-direct.

I had a feeling it was being self hosted when I pinged the forum the other day and my pings came back from keto.whipped.cream.org, great!

(Ethan) #11

Yeah… I don’t think it’s a cloud-based, tiered architecture… AWS would be the best place of course, but likely self-hosted for several reasons…

(KCKO, KCFO 🥥) #12

Thanks for that info @ PaulL,

I had gotten a message from him as well a week ago when it was really bad as well. I’ve posted messages about folks joining Patreon to help with getting the server replaced. I knew his exams were about to happen too. Let’s hope he aces the exams and has enough $$$ to replace the server.

I have noticed that in the last year or so the number of photos has risen, I am sure that is not helping either.

(Karen) #13

Seems to me we could get rid of “what did you keto today“ and all the photos for parts 1,2 and 3. We could just keep the current one. I’d be OK with that even though I would miss some of the pictures

(Allie) #14

Agree, they’re not needed.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #15

The Discourse software runs under Unix/Linux. As I understand it (and I could certainly be wrong), the server is based at an ISP in Canberra. Host companies often let users provide or upgrade hardware to meet their requirements.

As for “the cloud,” just remember that it is nothing more nor less than someone else’s computer.

As for the image size limit, I know we were facing a lack of storage capacity when the current troubles began, but my impression was that we upgraded to a larger hard drive, and that the current trouble with the server is something different. I could certainly be wrong about that, however, and I am sure @richard will provide a more accurate explanation at some point, when he has time. But let’s just let him get through his exams in peace, please.

(Bob M) #16

This would be good. I never go to those, as I have to page through them.

(KCKO, KCFO 🥥) #17

I agree. It is nice to see them but rarely are they revisited.

Personally, I think it would be fine to age off a lot of the topics, some have had no new activity for years now. I’d like all the resource type topics to stay as stickies, but things like fasting topics, that get tons of replies daily and even hourly some periods, could age off gracefully. I think it would be ok, to just post in a topic that in X amount of days the information will be erased, so you could print/copy off anything in it you thought you might want to keep.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #18

I suspect there’s something amiss with the server hardware. Disk space these days is dirt cheap. I just purchased a 4 Terrabyte hard drive for $125 bucks from my local London Drugs. and there’s no reason a high volume, high content site like this forum doesn’t have enough ‘disk space’ for the needs. Or any reason to clear out photos or anything else to ‘save disk space’. The server is running Nginx which was designed specifically to handle high concurrent loads - like this forum - and judging by the high volume sites that use it, does that very well. Which leaves the server. A capable server is, of course, expensive. Hopefully, only a single component requires replacement.

(Bob M) #19

Your drug store has…hard drives?

I have a home server with 15 Tbytes of space and 6 TB of parity (two disks, so double parity; two drives can go down and I can still recover), and a 3 TB “cache” drive that’s called a warm spare.

I think Richard had bought SSDs (solid state drives, no spinning disks). I would assume it’s other hardware.

Hardware goes. We use a “home theater” computer, and I’ve replaced at least 3 of these in not too many years. I finally went back to building my own computers, as then I can select the hardware – and particularly the fans, as I HATE fan noise.

#20

Would be good to know which flavor of Linux this forum is running on since not all Linux distros are as swift as Fedora Linux. My 2 cents.

@amwassil Server storage isn’t the same as cheap storage.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #21

London Drugs is a ‘general store’. It’s an authorized Apple Dealer plus sells/services other name brand and white box components, peripherals and systems. They also have a very nice kitchen appliance section where I have purchased multiple appliances over the years. They probably started out as a dedicated drug store and gradually expanded over the decades.

My point simply is that of all the components of a modern web server, hard drives are amoung the lower cost items. So there’s little need to skimp on storage space. The drive I bought is SSD [Edit: oops, no]. My first hard drive was an amazing 20 megs that cost more than 2x the new 4T drive.