2010-10-21: Expected Downtime

[dimopoulos]

Ladies,

Just a status update on our community.

Complaints
The forum is slow. If it ain't broke... I want my money back... It takes ages to load... This is rediculous...

We heard/read it all. We are not on holidays and we definitely do not want the forum to be something that affects your viewing experience - we want it to enrich your viewing experience. It appears that after all the work that has been put into the upgrade the forum is still slow, for a number of reasons.

Actions
There has been a huge amount of resources in time and money that has been invested in making the forum work faster. We have introduced a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which is used to serve content from a location nearest to your location. So for instance if you request an image and you live in NY, the image will be served from the node which is in NY and not from our server which is in AZ. That speeds up things.

We also purchased various optimization plugins, installed specific applications to aid with the delivery of data and even changed web servers to ensure that everything is as fast as possible. Clearly everything that we did has not helped as much as we would have liked. We did manage to drop the load time by 2 seconds but it is not enough.

Solution
We have decided to take more drastic steps. The forum will be closed for extensive maintenance the first week of November. We expect the forum to be closed Friday November 05 and will open again on Monday or Tuesday. There will be a page outlining the progress made and the expected time that the forum will be up and running.

What are we going to do
The forum will be reverted back to the version 3.8. There were valid reasons to move to the new version but the expectations we had from it were short lived. To that effect we will be reverting back to the old version with a lot of changes.

We will work with our server technician to upgrade our servers so as to eliminate any slowness from that aspect. We will also install a program on the servers to ensure that the data is served as fast as possible. The goal is to achieve less than 2 seconds load time. I have seen it happen with other sites and this is what we are aiming for.

I would like to thank you all for your patience and rest assured we are working on the issues.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Thanks!

[lync7]

YEA!!!!!! old way was much better!!!

[Sequoia]

It's a pity the upgrades are being reversed cos I've had minimal problems with it. But it makes sense to do so if the costs outweigh the benefits. Thanks for letting us know.

[MrsMe]

Are we still gonna have the LHCF app? Please don't take that away! That's the best thing that has happened since I joined the site.
I killed my phone battery with it yesterday.

Sent from my HTC Evo

[dimopoulos]

Yes the LHCF is here to stay. It will will also work with the downgrade.