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Server updates coming
As you may already know TSF is hosted on a dedicated server which costs a fortune to run, I also use the TSF server to host a few of my clients website who need more resources than the average website would use, recently some members have been experiencing javascript problems which I have been trying to resolve but the problem persists and as yet I have not found a reasonable answer to this problem partly being down to me not being able to reproduce the problem myself (Seems to only effect people using PC's, something which I do not own myself)
On finals day near to the end of The World Snooker Championships you will experience outage of TSF, this is nothing unusual as it happens every year just because of the amount of traffic, over the years I have upgraded the dedicated server to try and handle this but once the final ball has been potted we always experience the outage for about 30 minutes, basically the server thinks it is being threatened by a DDos attack and shuts down, so I apologise for this in advance although this year it may not happen as I have made lots of code tweaks on the server to try and prevent it.
I have been consulting with a few vBulletin experts over the past few weeks and together we are going to do a test using TSF as the test subject, I know that does not sound good but trust me it will be great if it works.
Basically the dedicated server is setup with RedHat CentOS with a cPanel licence which can cater for anything you would ever need in terms of hosting a website with any type of language and functions most of which TSF does not need so we are going to setup a new dedicated server still on CentOS but using Centmin Mod which will enable us to do all sorts of geeky / techy stuff to make TSF run better.
It will be setup purely for functions that TSF needs to run the website we will not even have the ability for emails! I will be pointing the MX records for emails to another server to handle so when I send out a mailshot TSF will not experience any speed problems we will also be swapping out the standard harddrives from the server and putting in SSD's to improve data read speeds and we will be using a non-standard version of MySQL which will also improve database request speeds. All threads which are older than 3 months will also be cashed instead of calling them direct from the database, once a thread which is older than three months gets a new post it will be indexed back into the database and taken off of the cache list, doing this again should dramatically improve the speed to requests which I do not think is a problem at the moment anyway but always noce to speed things up.
The final change will be the upgrade to vBulletin 5 and the launch of the new iOS and Android apps which will be done at the same time as moving to the new dedicated server, vBulletin 5 has some nice new features, I have actually been running a test installation of TSF using vBulletin 5 and so far so good but we will be loosing the front page layout
but do not worry there is one very similar which I will be switching to, it does the same thing but is a tabbed layout.
I will endeavour as in the past to have no outage when this all happens but with so many changes happening at the same time I can not guarantee that there will not be any outages, I would expect TSF to be offline for about 12 hours, we will try to do this over night and I will inform you all when this is going to happen, I have a meeting with the techy who I am going to employ to do this for me this time instead of attempting it myself, the meeting is happening at the end of June in Scotland and I would expect all these changes to happen around July 18th which historically is a quiet time on TSF anyway.
The mobile apps will be release between 2-6 weeks after that the initial changes.
Any questions please let me know.
Edit: I just wanted to add that it is going to take so long before we make the changes as we have to test the server configurations and we have to wait three weeks for the actual hardware to turn up which has been ordered today, it also has to be put into the rack at the data-centre so it will be 4 weeks before we can even start installing the software.
On finals day near to the end of The World Snooker Championships you will experience outage of TSF, this is nothing unusual as it happens every year just because of the amount of traffic, over the years I have upgraded the dedicated server to try and handle this but once the final ball has been potted we always experience the outage for about 30 minutes, basically the server thinks it is being threatened by a DDos attack and shuts down, so I apologise for this in advance although this year it may not happen as I have made lots of code tweaks on the server to try and prevent it.
I have been consulting with a few vBulletin experts over the past few weeks and together we are going to do a test using TSF as the test subject, I know that does not sound good but trust me it will be great if it works.
Basically the dedicated server is setup with RedHat CentOS with a cPanel licence which can cater for anything you would ever need in terms of hosting a website with any type of language and functions most of which TSF does not need so we are going to setup a new dedicated server still on CentOS but using Centmin Mod which will enable us to do all sorts of geeky / techy stuff to make TSF run better.
It will be setup purely for functions that TSF needs to run the website we will not even have the ability for emails! I will be pointing the MX records for emails to another server to handle so when I send out a mailshot TSF will not experience any speed problems we will also be swapping out the standard harddrives from the server and putting in SSD's to improve data read speeds and we will be using a non-standard version of MySQL which will also improve database request speeds. All threads which are older than 3 months will also be cashed instead of calling them direct from the database, once a thread which is older than three months gets a new post it will be indexed back into the database and taken off of the cache list, doing this again should dramatically improve the speed to requests which I do not think is a problem at the moment anyway but always noce to speed things up.
The final change will be the upgrade to vBulletin 5 and the launch of the new iOS and Android apps which will be done at the same time as moving to the new dedicated server, vBulletin 5 has some nice new features, I have actually been running a test installation of TSF using vBulletin 5 and so far so good but we will be loosing the front page layout
but do not worry there is one very similar which I will be switching to, it does the same thing but is a tabbed layout.I will endeavour as in the past to have no outage when this all happens but with so many changes happening at the same time I can not guarantee that there will not be any outages, I would expect TSF to be offline for about 12 hours, we will try to do this over night and I will inform you all when this is going to happen, I have a meeting with the techy who I am going to employ to do this for me this time instead of attempting it myself, the meeting is happening at the end of June in Scotland and I would expect all these changes to happen around July 18th which historically is a quiet time on TSF anyway.
The mobile apps will be release between 2-6 weeks after that the initial changes.
Any questions please let me know.
Edit: I just wanted to add that it is going to take so long before we make the changes as we have to test the server configurations and we have to wait three weeks for the actual hardware to turn up which has been ordered today, it also has to be put into the rack at the data-centre so it will be 4 weeks before we can even start installing the software.
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