OT: Forum Question

Atrocities · #1 February 17th, 2005, 06:44 AM

I just wanted to know if any one else is having a problem logging onto or posting on the forum each night between 11pm PST and 2am PST?

For the last several days I have noticed that I cannot load the forum during those hours, or that if I can, it runs so slow that I can not do anything.

Perhaps it is performing a nightly back up or something?

Alneyan · #2 February 17th, 2005, 06:49 AM

Same here, although it is in the morning, local time. The forum can still be browsed however: it takes about five minutes to load any page, so long as the page does not time out.

Jack Simth · #3 February 17th, 2005, 07:16 AM

Same here.

DeadZone · #4 February 17th, 2005, 07:23 AM

So its not just me thenm I was wondering

Atrocities · #5 February 17th, 2005, 08:28 AM

Looks like its a forum thing. Like I said, most likely a back up process or something.

Mindi · #6 February 17th, 2005, 02:00 PM

I'll see if Richard can look into this sometime this weekend. Our backups are on Sunday evening and should not be causing a problem the rest of the time. Sunday evening til Monday morning though I would always expect for it to be slow. We did recently switch servers, so I am assuming this is a recent thing?

Kamog · #7 February 17th, 2005, 10:43 PM

Oh, so I'm not the only one who's had trouble with the forum late at night!

Jack Simth · #8 February 18th, 2005, 02:20 AM

Pity you can't simply limit the backup's recource usage to 75% or something so that the forums can still handle traffic during a backup.

Will · #9 February 18th, 2005, 03:06 AM

Probably a bit difficult to do that, when usually resource management only limits memory and/or processor usage. The thing that would be slowing down the forums that much would be disk access. We post a lot

Maybe the backups can be changed, so that, say, once a month, the entire forums are dumped to backup. Then, to keep up to date, the nightly backups only backup posts between specific times. So, you would have the total backup for January, then on February 1, all the posts made from midnight to midnight EST would be backed up, repeat for each day of the month. Then, in the event that the backups are needed, just use the lastest monthly backup, then apply each daily backup to restore the forums fully. It increases by a bit the time needed to restore the forums, but decreases the time needed to backup dramatically.

rdouglass · #10 February 18th, 2005, 01:29 PM

Now there's one area Windows server shines (at least 2K3). I can do "Shadow Volume" backups any time of day and the server never slows down a bit; don't even have to take anything off line.

Not saying at all that Windows is best, just a little comparison there.