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I can't seem to get the CFC website to load at the moment. Does anyone else think that the CFC website might be down?
I posted something similar the other day on the CFC Discussion board on the CFC News Forum, but the whole CFC Discussion board has been very inactive for a long time as far as fresh posts go.
Last edited by Kevin Pacey; Saturday, 20th December, 2014, 04:24 PM.
Reason: Spelling
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer
I can't seem to get the CFC website to load at the moment. Does anyone else think that the CFC website might be down?
I posted something similar the other day on the CFC Discussion board on the CFC News Forum, but the whole CFC Discussion board has been very inactive for a long time as far as fresh posts go.
Kevin, it is working fine for me today. Actually, surprisingly quick. :)
But yesterday, it seemed to alternate between slow and okay.
I am on it everyday, and yes it can be frustrating. Friday seems to be particularly slow.
I have been monitoring and advising Resolution when it gets bad. That usually helps.
Keep us posted on your troubles.
I have found that sometimes my computer is the issue. Try clearing the browser cache or even a reboot. If that works, then....
Last edited by Bob Gillanders; Saturday, 20th December, 2014, 04:53 PM.
As mentioned in the online meeting it has become clear that Resolution is not able to provide support. They have told us this directly. The website is hosted on Amazon apparently. We are in the process of moving away from Resolution and probably Amazon as well and finding alternative hosting and support.
As mentioned in the online meeting it has become clear that Resolution is not able to provide support. They have told us this directly. The website is hosted on Amazon apparently. We are in the process of moving away from Resolution and probably Amazon as well and finding alternative hosting and support.
There are some others NOT worth using: GoDaddy and 1and1 etc. But there are a LOT of perfectly good hosting options around. Amazon? Seriously?? Wow.
Chess.ca is just intolerably slow. By the far the slowest website I use intermittently. Currently it's basically impossible to check ratings.
Agreed. I probably use the website more than anyone else, and it has been a source of great frustration. My calls to Resolution for tech support have been increasing over the last few months, and finally on monday they admitted they don't have the resources to support our site. As Vlad has said, we are now exploring alternatives. We've suffered enough.
Agreed. I probably use the website more than anyone else, and it has been a source of great frustration. My calls to Resolution for tech support have been increasing over the last few months, and finally on monday they admitted they don't have the resources to support our site. As Vlad has said, we are now exploring alternatives. We've suffered enough.
Hi Bob:
I'm kind-of scratching my head here. The CFC website isn't all that fancy. It's a basic (poorly arranged--why is the link to the Discussion Board at the very bottom--but I digress) 3-column CSS thingie with some submits to a back-end database. What kind of support is required for this that can't be supported? This is basic stuff.
I'm kind-of scratching my head here. The CFC website isn't all that fancy. It's a basic (poorly arranged--why is the link to the Discussion Board at the very bottom--but I digress) 3-column CSS thingie with some submits to a back-end database. What kind of support is required for this that can't be supported? This is basic stuff.
Steve
There is definitely something strange with the CFC web site. Here are some possible causes:
1) The number of users that it serves is tiny (Facebook gets about 10,000 visitors per second). So it is not like the CFC is pushing any bounds with regards to traffic. So I think we can cross traffic off the list.
2) The website is written using Drupal. Drupal is not my choice for this sort of thing but it should be more than sufficient for a low traffic website like the CFC has. It is highly unlikely that Drupal is fundamentally incapable of serving such a simple website.
3) Is the problem the AWS? Amazon is a little on the pricey side from my perspective and it offers things that really aren't important to an organization like the CFC (like up-time appropriate for a big-time eCommerce company, etc.) but there's certainly no reason to suspect that the AWS is the problem. The only problem that I can imagine with AWS is that the CFC is paying for the equivalent of a 15 year old PC with 640K of memory (i.e. the contract with AWS provides a very basic significantly throttled back service level). I don't have enough experience with AWS to say whether one can buy a totally useless level of service from AWS (none of my clients can afford AWS).
4) That leaves the database for the ratings. This in my mind is the most likely culprit. Unlike everything else in the website that would have been built with "off the shelf" Drupal components, the ratings part of the website is custom software (I believe). Possibly it is not written so well and it messes up the rest of the website (for instance, eating up resources because of poor garbage collection).
These are just conjectures but something does seem to be wrong.
Finally, if the CFC is going to new hosting, I can see the good sense in moving away from Cadillac-level hosting from AWS but I would not recommend going for something ultra-cheap like GoDaddy. There are lots of good mid-tier web-hosting providers. I would not advise moving to a new web-host until the CFC has good statistics on CPU, disk and network usage for the site otherwise it will be difficult to find an appropriate provider.
Last edited by Steve Karpik; Monday, 9th February, 2015, 01:47 AM.
That leaves the database for the ratings. This in my mind is the most likely culprit. Unlike everything else in the website that would have been built with "off the shelf" Drupal components, the ratings part of the website is custom software (I believe). Possibly it is not written so well and it messes up the rest of the website (for instance, eating up resources because of poor garbage collection).
Thank you Steve. I am thinking along those same lines. It is the only logical explanation for our problems.
....4) That leaves the database for the ratings. This in my mind is the most likely culprit. Unlike everything else in the website that would have been built with "off the shelf" Drupal components, the ratings part of the website is custom software (I believe). Possibly it is not written so well and it messes up the rest of the website (for instance, eating up resources because of poor garbage collection)....
If Java is being used, garbage collection probably takes place every Monday morning at 8:00 am, just in time to disrupt the Monday morning commute. :D
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
imho, that could be the main problem.
Just tracert chess.ca
At this moment I get too many timed outs...
The main chess.ca website is quite simple and it still does not load quickly... Add a database (rating) request and it gets even slower.
Many routers block the UDP and ICMP protocol that traceroute uses. So timeouts do not necessarily mean anything. I would be very surprised if an AWS host is on a had to reach segment of the Internet.
Drupal is written in PHP which has notoriously bad garbage collection. Bad garbage collection by the ratings database related codes would pollute the memory space that the web server has been assigned.
After a reboot of the server, the website would probably perform decently at least for regular pages. With time, the website likely gets less and less responsive because of memory leaks.
Drupal is written in PHP which has notoriously bad garbage collection. Bad garbage collection by the ratings database related codes would pollute the memory space that the web server has been assigned.
Using PHP to do any complex computation task is, in my experience, a misuse of the language. PHP is great for creating web pages but it isn't a high powered computational language. PHP should do no more than create the form for data entry and send the data entered to the back end database server, which is where the computation should always be done. If the CFC web site is trying to do ratings computations in PHP it is a badly broken design.
Drupal is written in PHP which has notoriously bad garbage collection. Bad garbage collection by the ratings database related codes would pollute the memory space that the web server has been assigned.
After a reboot of the server, the website would probably perform decently at least for regular pages. With time, the website likely gets less and less responsive because of memory leaks.
Thanks again Steve. Your comments tend to dovetail nicely with my experience with the system. The CFC rating software was written by Troy Vail back in 1996(?). So it is some pretty old code, written specifically for the CFC. AFAIK, Troy was a computer student, and if we paid him at all, we have certainly got out money's worth over 19 years. This is all before my days at the CFC, so if I have the history wrong, someone please correct me.
Resolution have told me they do regular maintenance overnight, so perhaps that entails "taking out the garbage". When the site does get very slow, it tends to spiral down quickly, then I have to call Resolution. I'm guessing at that point, they do a reboot.
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