So we are now back… what happened, why it happened, where to go from here?
I learned a lot about discourse and this is where we’re at.
What happened?
The site went down because post migration, the performance was bad, I worked tirelessly trying to optimise it but I couldn’t. The database could not respond fast enough for the web server workers to handle the load. It turned out, this was kind of complicated.
Why?
Discourse was designed from the start with docker in mind. Although the application doesn’t have official support outside docker, it was designed also to NOT SCALE:
External databases do not get the magic rake db:migrate that is supposed to optimise the database. I tried many times to do this on external databases including databases that run on the server, just not in the docker container. It ONLY worked on in-the-container databases.
What now?
Well due to how discourse is designed I have to recind on point in time recovery. It doesn’t work because write ahead logs are not possible in discourse’s current design without a lot of customization.
Are we staying with discourse? Maybe. I will definitely investigate alternatives and potentially migrate to a different forum software. But finding something with feature parity is unlikely.
There is a silver lining
uploaded files still go to an s3 storage in moldova (where loli and the dmca is ignored.)
I am far more technically equiped to handle further discourse technical things with as much as I learned these past 4 days.
Yes, the site is currently not enjoyable. Took me almost 30 minutes to post a topic, the uploads were long and littearly tooks 30 seconds to list each mandatories tags and above… (Ive posted my topics with only mandatories ones, will complete later…)
Have still one topic to post for the Event, hope I’ll be able to before the deadline ;D
Good luck VladTheImplier , and thank you for your work
Since the migration, if I’m browsing incognito, using either Brave or Safari on MacOS, typing ‘eroscripts.com’ into the address bar results in “server not responding”.
I need to edit the address which the browser is trying to load, ‘https://discuss.eroscripts.com’ remove the ‘s’ in https, and hit enter, then the site loads.
The redirect is causing gyp.
This was not the case pre-migration - typing ‘eroscripts.com’ and whacking enter worked.
Could you add it to the list of stuff to look at please?
This was a big scare indeed, I’m glad we’re back, even if the site’s performance is less than stellar. Thank you for your efforts Vlad!
I call out to every paid scripter in the site to become a Patron. Being able to sell our work in the forum should not be taken for granted, it’s a privilege, not an inherent or acquired right. We should all chip in IMHO.
I agree, it’s a little better than this morning when I’ve posted topics, but we are far from smooth and fast. We are still under « normal » performance from some days ago before the migration.
I’ve hesitated to answer to AniFs with a « doubt » GIF…
@tradethevolman I’m very confused as to why you are suggesting Discord.
As from my own personal experience and knowledge even if TOS doesn’t instantly rule it out, there is no way to have many things be handled without custom bots and such at the very least. A lot of features are also paywalled behind nitro and server boosting that anyone with existing accounts that don’t want to make another account for will want or require. Also while Discord has the Thread system it is not suitable or designed for this many threads to be used or dipped in and out of while new ones are made every day. Moderation would be hell to do without an bot since Discord’s moderation isn’t setup for an forum method rather than once in a while messages or bad users.
Personally from the sounds of it, it’s sounding like either using something other than discourse is needed as a forum system or an massive modification needs to be done to the discourse code (if that’s even possible) for us to get better server performance at this point. Unless the discourse dev team can help at all with possible ideas and such? (presuming they haven’t been reached out to at this point)
Starting fresh now rather than later if we have to is better especially as the amount of content on the site will only keep growing over time so if stuff can only be manually transferred it can be easier to get done.
yeah discord is a bad idea, also from the content preservation angle. there’s no solid way to backup/restore what’s on discord servers. and if you didn’t think the loli/shota ban is justified right now, with discord that’s going to become a necessity.
honestly? this is purely as an user and not a webmaster/administrator, but i never really liked discourse. it strayed too much from how most (all?) bulletin board type software in the past has worked, and even though joining this community has helped me get used to it a little bit more, i still don’t like the cut of its jib. so if there’s now a technical reason to switch off of it, then hell yeah lmao
i don’t visit many forum sites these days, but the few sites i do seem to be running on xenforo. maybe that’s the play?
either way, good luck to you in getting the site going.
First of all, thank you! It’s fantastic that someone is taking on this issue without getting payed for that work! I really appreciate that!
Maybe I missed it but is there an overview of what is currently being worked on and how things will proceed? Unfortunately, the performance has never been this bad. I must admit I’m a bit concerned that other software is already being mentioned/discussed. I believe we shouldn’t rush things. That’s just my two cents.
