Better to try...

[Gustav]

and fail, than never to try at all!?

Ive been jonesing to get back into Gropdiy.com to browse through the old archives for the last ten days, but every times it gave me the maintenance error, I thought "Sure hope Ethan isn't staying up all night stressing about this".

Thanks for successfully updating the security issues and thanks for attempting to set up the new forum.  I suspect we all appreciate your efforts way more than you could ever imagine...

Gustav

 

[CJ]

failure?  no,  just learning stuff,

looks fine to me, long live Group DIY! 

 

[zebra50]

Well done Ethan - your efforts are appreciated.
FWIW everything is loading up much faster now, so definitely improved.
Stewart

 

[Holger]

I second that. Good to have the forum back.

 

[weiss]

indeed, seems faster now. 8)

 

[AErige]

I suspect we all appreciate your efforts way more than you could ever imagine...

definitly

Fwiw i got used to the SMF look and love its simplicity  and its fast now so not a failure for me ( well i'm biased cause I couldn't even load more than the home page of the BB design  ;D)
PS: I just noticed attached files aren't to be found anymore (I get an error 404 for pdf and pictures).

 

[helterbelter]

Ethan,

Totally glad all worked out in the end. And I certainly hope you didn't have too many sleepless nights..........

You failed ?
What ?!?
I think it's because of you that we have this great place. The best forum in the world if you ask me.

So, nothing but appreciation from all of us to you, I'm sure of that.

 

[Deepdark]

Thanks for everything Ethan. You not failed, you just learned, as we do all the time here. Keep up the great work

 

[bruno2000]

Thanks so much for your efforts.  I could not believe how much I missed this place.
You did not fail, you just learned what doesn't work.......
Best,
Bruno2000

 

[JohnRoberts]

what doesn't kill us makes us stronger....

JR

 

[Gustav]

what doesn't kill us makes us stronger....

JR

What doesn't kill you almost kills you... 

Gustav

 

[Rocinante]

I too applaud you Ethan.  I cant tell you how many times I checked Gdiy in hopes that it was back up and running. Much faster for me too.

 

[pvision]

I echo the comments. I've done this type of big upgrade myself and had to roll back to the previous version. It's frustrating on lots of levels

So, thanks for the hard work, Ethan!

Nick Froome

 

[sahib]

Operation was a success but the patient died  ;D .

As already said. Better to try.

Thank you for your efforts to make this a better place.

 

[iomegaman]

I really do appreciate this place probably more than any other forum I visit, found I depend on it a lot as well...

Just a thought...I know we all have the ability to contribute etc for Ethans efforts, but was wondering if maybe we might install a sort of "forum % operating cost" feature in the black market...I dunno like maybe a small percentage of every sale it might be miniscule compared to some of the bargains that I have purchased over the years, but if it helps in later migration/upkeep etc...it would be well worth it...I know it is not a popular idea kind of a "tax" model but at some point we must be creative in helping support a new economic model...there is an obvious infrastructure to this information highway and in some small fashion a slight "toll" booth that accumulates is not beyond the pale.

 

[s2udio]

Better to fail trying ,, than never trying at all, 
Good Work Ethan, All your effort is so appreciated , in....
Keeping this nirvanah and cornocopia of DIY audio information  , active and alive.
Thank You , you sir are a star.

 

[pucho812]

Ethan rocks for all his hard efforts and work that he does to keep this place open so knuckleheads like myself can share mel blanc talking about how records are made.  8)

Remember the only failure in life is to not be true to the best one knows.

Thanks for everything.

 

[braeden]

I don't know why you guys didn't just copy the forum directory & SQL database to a separate folder, set up the new forums and then merge that folder into the root directory on the server when the new install was finished. That way there would have been less downtime and we'd still be able to access the forums.

:'(

 

[Ethan]

Thanks guys.

I don't know why you guys didn't just copy the forum directory & SQL database to a separate folder, set up the new forums and then merge that folder into the root directory on the server when the new install was finished. That way there would have been less downtime and we'd still be able to access the forums.
:'(

Braeden,  the issue wasn't that simple.
Initially I thought I'd have it done in a day.
It took 2 days to convert the entire GroupDIY database--twice it stalled so I had to restart from scratch. And that was with just 10ms delay intervals between each SQL query on an Intel i5 2.8GHz dual core processor with 16G RAM and SSD.
The db structure was being converted from SMF to BBpress. I had to lock the old db before doing the conversion to ensure the converted db would be in sync with when the conversion finished.

After 2 failed conversions, the 3rd went well. Running some tests everything looked good.

Then...
1) I opened the site back up...instant flood of traffic. Server crash.
2) OK... No problem. Reboot, and throttle traffic until the cache builds back up.
3) Allotted 512MB for the opcode cache (that's a big cache for 1 site, for instance we're running great now with 128MB) got primed, opened the gate again... OK for 15mins, crash.
4) Fine, lets try 1G...nope. How about 2G...nope. Let's just be stupid and try 4G. That was good for an hour but still, nope.
5) The 10th day 11th hour decision was to revert back to SMF.

There's a big performance/scalability issue with BBpress if a moderately large site like GroupDIY can't run without maxing out our box on modest traffic--even when allowing a stupid amount of memory for the cache to offload redundant CPU cycles. After having invested so much time into the conversion, I could have tried throwing more hardware at it as a brute force solution...but, that just seemed silly.

 

[Rochey]

@Ethan,

How many users are on groupdiy at one time?

/R