ANNOUNCEMENT: BC Server upgrade

Hi all,

I am in the process of migrating the BC server to a more updated server architecture.

The migration will happen in 2 phase, the first phase already started and many of you might already be using the new server to browse BC right now.

Unfortunately, for the 2nd phase, as with any server migration, there will be a couple hours of downtime, and most likely happening during the weekend.

So please bear with us in the meantime. And do report to us if you see some strange behavior. I will announce the 2nd phase migration when that comes.

 

hehe. jyeung already found an issue with image uploading. fixed now.

 

upgrade is mostly done.

now we are running off the new server. seems to be quite fast. still quite a few users on the old one and will be slowly migrated over automatically over the course of the day.

 

the process is complete. however, there seems to be issue with image attachment. some images are not showing up. i am working on fixing it thus there might be some downtime over the weekend.

 

I think I managed to restore the image attachment back to the correct state. do let me know if you see any issues.

FYI, over the years we have accumulated over 10GB of images. that's a lot of images.

 

And apologize for the lengthy down time today. Having to move and restore all the images across half the continent took longer than i expected. Hope everyone managed to get some time outside, perhaps playing some badminton.

 

yeah. stats says 130,000+ images was uploaded to BC. that's a lot of images!!!

 

glad to see that everyone is still here after the hiccups i encountered during the upgrade.

everything seems good now and i do feel that the new servers are much faster than before. all of the chronic issues i had with the old server seems to be gone as well.

all users have been migrated to the new user now. the old server will be decommissioned at the end of the week.

the SSF next month will be a good test for the loading of the server.

 

well, the old server, which has served the BC community well since 2008, has now been decommissioned. the new servers seem to be stable and noticably faster from my end. hope they will stay that way.

 

yeah. i think so. load time for me is usually less than 5 seconds, as low as 3 seconds.

i think from Asia, probably in the region of 10 second to load everything.

 

the server upgrade started in late November. in late December the new BC front page was added.

in between then and now, there had been a lot of fine tuning. i have literally went through half a dozen servers in order to balance between processing power, memory and cost. apologies to everyone who endures quite a few hours of downtimes.

in the end, the configuration that seem to be the most speedy is very similar to what it started off with.

now that the servers are stabilized, more time and effort will be spent on the software as well as better content for everyone. if you are interested in writing for BC, please contact me.

Happy New Year!