Topic: Site Features & Issues
Website Maintenance - Monday Morning
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10.19.2018 | 3:13 PM ET
Heads up everyone --- We are planning to do maintenance to the website Monday morning, sometime between 9am ET and 12pm ET. Exact time to be determined.
It will involve at least an hour of the site being completely unavailable.
We know that's inconvenient, but it is by far the easier (and less expensive) option for certain kinds of server upgrade work. There are ways to do this without having any downtime - that's what bigger companies do - but for us it does not make sense to go through so much extra effort to avoid a short outage.
After the maintenance the site should be exactly the same. No new features or anything like that. We release small new features and changes all the time without any downtime. But this downtime has to do with switching to newer/better servers.
Sorry for the outage! Feel free to ask any questions if you want more details.
It will involve at least an hour of the site being completely unavailable.
We know that's inconvenient, but it is by far the easier (and less expensive) option for certain kinds of server upgrade work. There are ways to do this without having any downtime - that's what bigger companies do - but for us it does not make sense to go through so much extra effort to avoid a short outage.
After the maintenance the site should be exactly the same. No new features or anything like that. We release small new features and changes all the time without any downtime. But this downtime has to do with switching to newer/better servers.
Sorry for the outage! Feel free to ask any questions if you want more details.
* Edited at 10.19.2018, 3:14 PM ET *
"I live, I die, I live again."
Responses
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10.19.2018 | 7:29 PM ET
Do your thing Greg. Can't wait to see the upgrades in due time.
"..."
10.20.2018 | 11:25 AM ET
@fishrat okay since you asked. But it's not terribly exciting!
All of Tapology is running on virtual servers. That is, we don't own any actual servers or hardware. You just pay a big 3rd party company like Amazon, Linode, Digital Ocean or Heroku to give you control of "virtual" servers that they operate in giant server warehouses.
All of our servers are running on Ubuntu 14 which is a version of Linux that is getting pretty old and will no longer be supported come April 2019.
Furthermore, the hardware configurations have all gotten better. So we might be paying $100 a month for a particular virtual server that has 16gb of memory. But if we rent a NEW virtual server that has 16gb of memory, the price is only $50 a month. But you don't just get the price discounts. You have to actually abandon the old servers and move onto new ones.
So what we're doing is shutting down all the old Ubuntu 14 virtual servers and moving onto new ones running Ubuntu 18. And we'll also save some money over time, because each one will be less expensive.
To move the Tapology data over (that is, the part of our servers where we actually have a database with all our data), we have to shut the whole website down for downtime. The database is constantly updating throughout every day with all kinds of updates. If we don't shut the website down first before we copy over the database, the two versions won't match. You might make fight picks, and then 20 minutes later when we're using the new servers, those fight picks are gone. To avoid that, we'll take the whole site down first.
"I live, I die, I live again."
10.20.2018 | 5:40 PM ET
Jesus Ubuntu is up to 18 now? Man I am out of the loop. Glad to hear that you're using Linux as the platform, everyone who knows what they're doing does. Much more secure and just roundly better an more customizable in every way. Only reason I don't run it is because so many games either won't run on it ( steam) or on't work properly. Also Java ( yick) issues in the past. And, you know...I'm not doing anything important anyway.
Have rented a few servers in the past for large MMO/open world type games ( Ark and 7 days to die). None have been amazing, slim pickings with what we can get here in Aus and still get some semblance of respectable ping. Blackbox is about as good as we can get.
Have rented a few servers in the past for large MMO/open world type games ( Ark and 7 days to die). None have been amazing, slim pickings with what we can get here in Aus and still get some semblance of respectable ping. Blackbox is about as good as we can get.
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10.22.2018 | 1:12 PM ET
Well that took a BIT longer than planned!
"I live, I die, I live again."
10.22.2018 | 2:49 PM ET
If there are any issues or strange things anyone sees, please let us know. Otherwise things seem to be working just fine!
"I live, I die, I live again."
10.22.2018 | 6:45 PM ET
If there are any issues or strange things anyone sees, please let us know. Otherwise things seem to be working just fine!
Earlier I tried to change the round finishes when editing some picks..... and I literally turned in to a salamander.
In all seriousness though it seems to be working fine. Let me try something...
Ok, that's cool. For whatever reason, I can now upload GIFS/memes using the image ( link) button. Prior to the updates it flat out never workjed for me on Opera. I'm using the same extensions etc, so make of that what you will.
* Edited at 10.22.2018, 6:55 PM ET *
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10.22.2018 | 6:58 PM ET
@fishrat don't know what to tell you about that! sounds odd. I can't think of why an updated Ubuntu package would cause that. The Tapology code is the same.
"I live, I die, I live again."
10.22.2018 | 8:10 PM ET
@fishrat
Your main problem is using Opera. Use Firefox like a normal person, weirdo. ;)
"..."
10.22.2018 | 8:41 PM ET
eeehh I wish I could go back to firefox. I mean I really want to support Mozilla or anything that isn't google, but Mozilla were always the guys that were all about privacy and open source. Last few versions I tried they had allied with yahoo and I didn't like the interface. Been a few years now, I might give them another look in.
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