BC / BF will be going through some changes in the next few days.

the first step is migrating to a new server. BC / BF will soon be served from a much faster server with a fatter connection than before.

1. i have just moved BC over to the new server a few minutes ago. it will take a day or two for the server change to get to you. the temporary change you will see is that the peek into the review and forum at the front page will go away. and the review section will no longer be functional (in fact, it is very broken right now, read further for reason)

2. if that's successful, BF will move in the next few days, that will be a more difficult move than BC and it will require brining down the forum for an hour or two. so if you see BF not there, don't panic, we will be back.

after that, i will have a series of software upgrades : the upgrades will go in the following order:

1. a brand new review section (yay...), that will take a day or so. as a result of the new review section, i am not really taking any time fixing up the old one. i will make sure all the relevant old reviews gets migrated though.

2. new BC - that may take more days as i am still in the process of designing it. this will be a challenge but it will be much better than the current BC (not hard. :) )

with all these changes, the end result will be a much better BC/BF experience for all you folks. the content hopefully will be better, and also much better speed and reliability from the servers.. so please bear with me during this transitional period...

cheers.
- your BF staff, at your service.

woot... i did indeed live long enough to see the move :p :p :D

cheers 2 u guys for all the hard work

hats off to u guys. I have to say BC was quite a site for badminton when i first saw it, i look forward to the update

i had no problems with the forum as it was! i can't wait to see what it'll be like with any upgrades

as for BC, it really does need a new reviews section! i think i'll enjoy it once it arrives, best of luck and keep up the good work!

if you are reading this, you have made it to the new server. all i did was migrate all the post over. and i think the migration works pretty well.

you will notice that the web address / URL is not www.badmintonforum.com yet. in a day or two, the address will be active in your location. meanwhile, any access to badmintonforum.com will be directed to this numeric address.

besides that, nothing should be new.

you will find that you need to log in with your password again. aside from that. everything should be identical.

if you have any problems, please let me know!

welcome back!

i was wondering why i had to log off!

when was the switch made? The board went offline a few times late last night after 4am-ish but i wasn't logged off until this morning.

Not related to the forums, but the reviews on BC are currently farked;

Wrong argument
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Badminton Central Product Reviews

Originally posted by bigredlemon
i was wondering why i had to log off!

when was the switch made? The board went offline a few times late last night after 4am-ish but i wasn't logged off until this morning.

the switch was made between around midnight and 1-2am PST.

the new server has new cookies from different IP address. so you should've (must've) been "logged off" after the server switch.

the review section... yeah. i will have the new one up and running within a day or two. so i am not going to spend anytime fixing up the old one. actually, i will make it disappear for the next two days...

how's the speed? seems faster, no?

Originally posted by kwun
how's the speed? seems faster, no?
Its now near late-2002 speeds.

I can spider your forum to find out the speed for you! yes/no?

Originally posted by bigredlemon
Its now near late-2002 speeds.

I can spider your forum to find out the speed for you! yes/no?

interesting. well, the DB is much much bigger now. but i just did a comparison with the old server with yesterday's db, the speed up is noticable.

you can spider, we have tons of bandwidth now. but what are you hoping to achieve?

i was moving the 95MB compressed db from the old server to my work computer, then from work computer to the new server. the data rate from old server to here is around 650k/s, the data rate from here to the new server was at around 1050k/s (pretty much saturated the 10Mbs card)

Originally posted by bigredlemon
i was wondering why i had to log off!



Same question here.

I was like, "what the hell happened???" Someone stole my password and changed it? My bad memory messed me up, and I think I tried 10 times to finally get back.

to see how many connections per second your database can handle, as well as the access time for the hard drive. BF isn't serving big files so the max bandwidth isn't as important.

started spidering now... was only able to achieve 3kB/s at first but now it's up to 30kB/s using 10 threads... the speed is slowly increasing. I thought it would start fast and slow down...

how are you generated the traffic? from a single computer or from a few computers? how about the connection of the computer(s), fast or slow?

and what's the conclusion?

Not enough ram? Slow HDD? Some pages are getting served almost instantly, but others are taking several seconds to minutes.

speed seems good, i should be able to tell the difference later on as it seems to me that BF runs slower in the peak hours around here

Originally posted by bigredlemon
Not enough ram? Slow HDD? Some pages are getting served almost instantly, but others are taking several seconds to minutes.

it depends. if the source machine is many hops from the server and it is generating enough traffic to saturate some slow links in between, you will have packets getting dropped on the network and as a result, it will trigger the replay mechanism at the TCP level. that may be the cause of the much slower response for some requests.

that's why i asked you how many machines are generating the traffic and where their locations are. if only one machine, and especially one far from the server itself, the result may not be conclusive and not too realistic a test...

Originally posted by kwun
it depends. if the source machine is many hops from the server and it is generating enough traffic to saturate some slow links in between, you will have packets getting dropped on the network and as a result, it will trigger the replay mechanism at the TCP level. that may be the cause of the much slower response for some requests.

that's why i asked you how many machines are generating the traffic and where their locations are. if only one machine, and especially one far from the server itself, the result may not be conclusive and not too realistic a test...
I'm lucky enough to be on a good line. (24 ms ping from Toronto to texas!)

My machine currently has 4000 active connections so another 10 probably won't kill it. I've tried the test again and the speed started at 30kB/s and ended at 1 mbit/s by the 100th file. Server caching must be working great. Your server can obviously handle 9+ continuous database requests. I tried to use a program that supports 100 connections but it failed... i guess it was confused by php. All in all pretty good!

btw, how does your site stats look? Is there a spike?

don't confuse latency with bandwidth though. ;)

i looked at the bandwidth usage graph. there is a small spike. most of the traffic you generated are dominated by creation of the TCP connection and the TCP connection handshake doesn't consume a lot of bandwidth and is mostly latency bound.

the spike created by the 95Meg transfer i did last night was 4x higher, that was only download with just IP traffic so that was able to saturate the bandwidth better. (note the graph was a bandwidth graph, not measure of # of connections nor latency...)

but a low latency connect means that a connection is not overloaded. The difference between the fastest ping and the ping during the spidering would be the time it took to serve that page, which indicate the speed of your database. Btw, I meant hits spike. Surely 1000 pageviews within a few minutes will generate some spike?! :)

With the new server, would it be possible for you to host a few videos? I'm sure many of us has webspace online, and can spare some bandwidth too. With enough of us, i'm sure we can reach near-badmintoncity levels of video availability.

Originally posted by bigredlemon
With the new server, would it be possible for you to host a few videos? I'm sure many of us has webspace online, and can spare some bandwidth too. With enough of us, i'm sure we can reach near-badmintoncity levels of video availability.

haven't you read swijaya's post on badmintoncity? i have much less bandwidth than he had....

how much extra bandwidth do you have?

personally, i can spare about 10 gigs right now. If I compress it to divx, that is about 150 video downloads. If there's ten of us sharers, then that's 1500 videos, which should be near badmintoncity's level.

ok. so phase 1 is done!

i see both badmintoncentral.com and badmintonforum.com successfully migrated. most ppl should be able to get to both website without the numeric web address / url.

phase 2 has begun. hopefully by the end of the weekend, may be monday if i am too busy with life, we will see the brand new review section. there is still a lot of work.

the most major one will be BC itself. hopefully within a week or two.

Wow!! BC is getting a major facelift! This is some great news!

Can't wait to see what Kwun has in store for us!

-Rick

Originally posted by kwun
ok. so phase 1 is done!

i see both badmintoncentral.com and badmintonforum.com successfully migrated. most ppl should be able to get to both website without the numeric web address / url.

phase 2 has begun. hopefully by the end of the weekend, may be monday if i am too busy with life, we will see the brand new review section. there is still a lot of work.

the most major one will be BC itself. hopefully within a week or two.

kwun, is it possible to delete the double posts in the reviews section, and also some non-relevant ones......such as "XXX IS THE BEST!!!!!!!!!"...they just take up space:(

Originally posted by SheldonZhang
kwun, is it possible to delete the double posts in the reviews section, and also some non-relevant ones......such as "XXX IS THE BEST!!!!!!!!!"...they just take up space:( I think we should moderate the review section as well. Saying "XXX is the best" isn't helpful. Saying "XXX is more powerful than these other strings xyz and zyx that i've tried" is more useful.

The worst one is the review section for a particular racket with people saying they have a completley different one, whats the relevance in that ??

agree. agree. i will clean up the review section before migrating to the new software. and the new software allows moderation. just perfectly what we need. ;)

In the past 24 hrs, seems I am experiencing some difficulties to access.

Last night, around 10-12pm (EST), as well as 10am (EST) today, I toally could not load the pages at all. Seems not my internet or browser, since I can access other web sites without any problem.

Wondering what happened?

same here.

its been happening alot lately

So, it's not just me.

Maybe Kwun can contact the provider see what is going on? Too much traffic? Server exchange? Or, actually Kwun was busy doing some "update"? ;)

a couple of evenings ago i did spent around an hour doing an upgrade. was intending to take around 5mins, but boy, it was a nightmare.

aside from that. i am not aware of any other downtime.... :(

This morning at 9:36am CST, one of distribution layer switches crashed. Normally, this would not cause an interruption in service, however during this outage we identified a single router that was affected. Upon inspection, it was discovered that this router had a bad GBIC on it's redundant connection to a secondary distribution layer switch. The distribution layer switch was reloaded and returned to normal service, restoring connectivity to the router that was down at 10:06am. The failed GBIC on the router's secondary connection has been replaced and is performing normally, however we will continue to monitor for 72 hours to be sure.

there were a couple of times in which the server was offline for about 10 minutes. Maybe it was for software upgrades?

where can i find tournaments results?

thanks