PlanetCatfish.com

All~

The forum will be closing its doors at 12 noon GMT today in order that we migrate is to a new database server. This should take about 1.5 hours, but as it's the first time we've attempted this, that's really a best guess.

The move is the first major step in addressing forum performance issue that we've been experiencing over the past 6 weeks or so.

If you can get back in to the forum this afternoon, it's back up running!

Jools

All~

The good news is the forum is up and running on our new database host. I thought it was worthwhile documenting that we did this because of very poor access for some users some of the time to the forum in particular. To remove the database server as a candidate for the cause of the problem, we needed to move to a new one. So the forum (& FAQ) database in now based in the UK, while everything else remains in California.

I guess the bad news is that it took days to move the thing. The main thing being the size of files we had to move around. There are 39 tables in the database, one of the three search tables has 2.3 million records alone! The text of all (96302) your posts is about 50meg and that's another table on it's own. There are 12739 private messages hanging around in your own areas too. I had to use new large file transfer software, inter database transfer tools and we had to reconfigure the Linux kernel on the target machine to get this all up and running.


You get the picture, it was hard, but we're here now and let's cross our fingers that performance issues are resolved.

Jools