Recent maintenance on website

Ok, so as promised, here are some responses to a few of the recent posts in this thread....

JBV66 - "Why is it it seems the rest of the club sites are working as normal? but it is as it seems , always CT that has this really long term issues?"

The current web performance issues are affecting all areas of the site. We are seeing slow page load speeds and Internal Server Errors across the site, not just CT. 

David Klyne - "I suppose you would expect to keeping booking side of website going over the Club Forum? I could be way off here but I wonder if the problem is that Club Together is constantly being updated by member posts. "

As with any business, the ability to sell products/services will be seen as a priority, I guess... but we have declared Major Incidents internally based on issues that are related only (or mostly) to Club Together, so we do take CT issues seriously. You make a valid point with the constant updating of posts in CT. Each one of these replies has to be written back to the database and then indexed, and some of the issues in the past month have certainly been index related. This current issue appears to be more to do with the way the caching is configured on the site.

Peedee - "I think CT and the main web site run on different servers and it sounds like the CT one is underfunded????? It could also be a problem with communicating between servers????"

No, everything you see on the website as a user is served up by the same web app servers. There are parts of the site that are handled by different code but fundamentally it all sits on the same infrastructure.

Cyberyacht - "There you have it. It's under-resourced. CT is the poor relation"

As above, this is not correct.

Bakers2 - "More essential maintenance last night. So much 'essential' maintenance???"

Unfortunately, there is at the moment as we continue to try and fix the current issues. We've had several short-lead time/emergency outages to try and implement potential fixes. 

Timwheeler - "I know nuffin but it seems logical to me that 'What are you all up to' is so huge it might make sense to bin it and start afresh to save storage space."

We don't actually have any particular space issues. I agree that some of the threads do seem very lengthy and probably hold info that is no longer relevant but that's just my personal opinion. I'm not the person responsible for maintaining the website, or even CT. 

Metheven - "First time ever I have been held in a queue online when looking at available site bookings"

The queuing system is always running in the background. A user will only actually be put into a queue when there are >45 transactions per second on the website. This morning, that threshold was reduced to help with load/performance.

MichaelT - "more server errors than actual pages, they may as well take the site of line till they can afford to fix it properly"

It's not a question of cost, it's more to do with finding the root cause of the current issues. Many log files have been analysed over the past few days, each with thousands and thousands of entries in them. Even with many technical teams looking at these logs, it's a time consuming process. Fixes are attempted to address these issues but they don't always fix the underlying issue and the process starts again.

I hope the above is useful in answering at least some of the questions/comments posed recently. 

I'm going back on the next technical call now, so won't be able to reply for a few hours if there are any responses/further questions.

Justin

Thanks, Justin.

Do you ever sleep? 🙂

I'm still getting server errors and each page takes quite a while to load, not worth posting atm

Me, too, Corners. Every now and then I get in by a fluke, I think.

Justin, many thanks for the feedback.  As you pointed out, there are quite a lot of very lengthy posts, not least the 'What are you all up to' thread with 36500 replies.  Surely the whole history for this post isn't needed? Can the oldest 36000 be Deleted User?  If not, and it does have a system impact then I would suggest deleting it. 

I know that when the system constantly malfunctions the pressure on the techies to get it fixed is immense.  Pressure can lead to rushed changes and version release without the ideal testing cycles being completed.  We need to be patient with Justin and the team and hopefully we will get back to 'normal'.  I guess that in a worse case scenario the techies will have to restore the system back to a safe point, but this might mean losing ALL updates/bookings after that point.

Just to clarify , the main fix hasn't yet gone live today. It's currently being tested on our non-production environments, with a view to promoting the fix to the live website later this evening.

EB, Justin responded to my point about deleting lengthy threads earlier. 

Soooo painfully sloooow!

Whoops! Thanks, TW. I have missed much of the last few days, not least because of the current issues.

Been looking back 3.5 years at the optimism expressed in the revised website.  That optimism quickly disappeared as we found reviews lost, stories Deleted User and retained stories with other folks photos attached, threads gone AWOL.  All these years later little has changed, it's taken me nearly 2 hours to post this