Joel
TS Technical Admin
- Favourite Ride
- Closed season on TST
Hello,
As you've probably noticed over the last few days TowersStreet has been inaccessible, showing errors or just generally not behaving on odd occasions when visiting. Truth is, we've been doing some work behind the scenes to adjust our configurations and optimise aspects of the server that run TowersStreet.
Whilst we don't have huge performance issues with the server, and we don't need to upgrade, it is important for us to check how things are running behind the scenes every so often and give things a tune up - which is exactly what we've been pushing hard over the last 24 hours.
As the site continues to grow in terms of visits and content, things do get a little slow and sluggish if they were just left as they were, so we've been making some changes to the configuration of nginx, PHP, MySQL and APC (our cache). We've been studying the slow queries log of the server hard, and also looking at the overall performance thanks to a brilliant monitoring application called "New Relic".
These tests showed that we could further improve our performance, and we began making small confident steps to improve the server. Then we took some larger steps and played with bigger settings and updated server software components to test the outcomes of them, and as that showed earlier today it lead to some large downtime.
We think we've got the optimal configuration for now, and I'm continuing to monitor the server constantly for any issues that come up and need correcting.
Here's the monitoring going on with my poor TV being made redundant to keep an eye on things...
Obviously all of this testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking and testing leads to interruptions to you, and whilst it was started in the dead of the night last night (well, from 11pm until 6am this morning) it did inevitably roll further into today during the tests, so apologies if it did affect you further.
Hopefully this latest configuration will prove stable over the next day so we are at our prime for the season beginning on Saturday - fingers crossed!
As you've probably noticed over the last few days TowersStreet has been inaccessible, showing errors or just generally not behaving on odd occasions when visiting. Truth is, we've been doing some work behind the scenes to adjust our configurations and optimise aspects of the server that run TowersStreet.
Whilst we don't have huge performance issues with the server, and we don't need to upgrade, it is important for us to check how things are running behind the scenes every so often and give things a tune up - which is exactly what we've been pushing hard over the last 24 hours.
As the site continues to grow in terms of visits and content, things do get a little slow and sluggish if they were just left as they were, so we've been making some changes to the configuration of nginx, PHP, MySQL and APC (our cache). We've been studying the slow queries log of the server hard, and also looking at the overall performance thanks to a brilliant monitoring application called "New Relic".
These tests showed that we could further improve our performance, and we began making small confident steps to improve the server. Then we took some larger steps and played with bigger settings and updated server software components to test the outcomes of them, and as that showed earlier today it lead to some large downtime.
We think we've got the optimal configuration for now, and I'm continuing to monitor the server constantly for any issues that come up and need correcting.
Here's the monitoring going on with my poor TV being made redundant to keep an eye on things...
Obviously all of this testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking and testing leads to interruptions to you, and whilst it was started in the dead of the night last night (well, from 11pm until 6am this morning) it did inevitably roll further into today during the tests, so apologies if it did affect you further.
Hopefully this latest configuration will prove stable over the next day so we are at our prime for the season beginning on Saturday - fingers crossed!
