Advance notice - forum may be unavailable on the morning of Saturday 14th April

[Molly Mockford]

On the morning of Saturday 14th April, the web host (i.e. the firm which provides the computers on which this forum lives) will be moving a lot of their computers about into new positions, in order to get more efficient performance from some of the busiest machines which are otherwise inclined to overheat in their current position.  This will involve closing down and unplugging some of the machines, and will have a noticeable effect on various of the services they provide, including this forum.  Problems are likely to be intermittent, and should be confined to the period from 8am to 12 noon British Summer Time - that's 7am to 11am GMT/UTC.  To convert GMT/UTC to your own local time, you can use http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx.

We hope that after Saturday morning's work has been carried out, some of the glitches and "Page Unavailable" messages which have cropped up occasionally will be sorted out.  Let's fact it - I can't work properly if I'm jammed in a corner and uncomfortably hot, so why should the computer that serves up the forum be any different?

[Howard]

Let's fact it

Steve, now's your chance for revenge on Molly for misspelling!

[steveg]

Let's fact it

Steve, now's your chance for revenge on Molly for misspelling!

Hahaha I Hadn't spotted that one Howard, nice one, and thank you for the prompt, but I shall leave it and just wallow in an ocean of smugness here! 

Steve

[Molly Mockford]

I've been unhappy with the speed of the forum since the maintenance was completed around lunchtime, and have been in contact with the web host, Gradwell, about this.  The following is a reliable situation update.

After the maintenance work carried out this morning, Gradwell are currently running with just three web servers in the cluster, instead of the usual six.  (There is also only one PHP5 server operational at the moment, rather than the usual two, but since this forum runs on PHP4 this wouldn't affect us.)  But you can see why everything is taking twice as long as usual!

The reason for the reduction in web servers is that they have removed three of the machines, two due to hardware failure (this is an ever-present danger when you start shifting computers around, especially ones which are used to running 24/7/52;  power them down, and they are likely to give a huge sigh and refuse to power up again) and one to clone the hard drive in order to bring further servers back online.  Once this disk cloning completes, they hope to revert to five web servers by the end of Sunday (i.e. up to 27.5 hours from the time of this post - work it out for your own timezone), with further servers coming online later in the week.

So it's a matter of being patient, I'm afraid, and hitting Refresh/Reload when you get a time-out message.

[steveg]

Yeah, it's been a bit of a pain hasn't it (up and down like a tart's drawers, is how I described it to Paula earlier today) , but if, in the long run, things will be better and more reliable then we all will have to bite the bullet and hang in there until it is sorted out.

Thanks for the update Molly - your efforts on our behalf are appreciated

Steve