Forum and server software update November or December 2022

[Martijn Meerts]

Hi all!

 

Once again, it's time for an update of the forum's software, and by extension the server's software.

 

Forum wise, there was a new, fairly big update a while ago. We tend to not immediately update bigger releases due to potential bugs, but it's about time we start working on the update. (Also, the giant messages the admins see that an update is available is getting annoying ...)

 

With this update, the forum will also require PHP8 as a minimum, which means the server software itself will also need an update. This should be relatively straight forward.

 

I will perform the update either later this week / early next week, or otherwise more towards the end of the year. With the update, I'll also renew the server license for another year or so, which should give us a nice discount.

 

[cteno4]

Thanks martijn! Yes the big blue banner does get annoying!

 

im having very slow load times the last month (up to 30 seconds) on the unread content page (it’s gotten progressively worse the last year). Other pages load quickly. I think there was a cashe issue a couple years back that you worked on that fixed this the last time this happened. Otherwise not seeing any issues with current version, let’s see what breaks, er is better, with the upgrades!

 

thanks again for all the under the hood work! Much appreciated!

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Yep, it’s been slow for me as well, haven’t really looked into it that much, and there weren’t really any complaints, so I figured it wasn’t high priority.

 

Performance wise, both the webserver and the database server should easily be able to handle everything, but I’ll do a bit of monitoring. Might be the caching server has gotten a bit wonky over the years, and needs a purge.

[cteno4]

Yeah I meant to post on the unread content page to see if that was an issue for others. I seem to remember you kicking the cashing server before and the issue went away. I think it started whe you started or upgraded the cashing server a few years back. It’s not horrible, just makes me practice patience! 
 

thanks,

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

I'm not having slow load times and I put a big load on my system with You Tube and streaming radio.  I use Chrome and its a desktop.

Edited November 23, 2022 by bill937ca

[miyakoji]

Yeah site performance seems fine to me.

Edited November 23, 2022 by miyakoji

[Martijn Meerts]

8 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Yeah I meant to post on the unread content page to see if that was an issue for others. I seem to remember you kicking the cashing server before and the issue went away. I think it started whe you started or upgraded the cashing server a few years back. It’s not horrible, just makes me practice patience! 
 

thanks,

 

jeff

 

Yeah, that's quite possible. They deprecated the caching solution they had, so I had to set up something new. I can't quite remember if I set up a local caching server on the webserver itself, or if I spun up a new server / service for it. I'll have to look into that when I'm doing the upgrades.

 

Although, theoretically, unread content shouldn't get cached since it changes quite often. But, we'll see 🙂

 

[cteno4]

Yeah doesn’t seem like cashing would be the issue there, more like the work would be in thebuild of the page looking at the user’s forum history. It’s the only page build for me that is ever slow.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Apparently, if you click the 'mark site read', even if you don't have any unread posts anymore, it'll speed up again. Seems like it's keeping track of some data that doesn't get removed correctly, but does get removed when you mark the entire site as read.

 

[cteno4]

Awesome sauce Martijn! That did it, loads right away. I figured it was some pile of dirty data that the db was sifting thru to build the unread content page and just slowing it way down!

 

thanks mucho!

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I uhm.. Kinda totally forgot about this update, so December 2022 will be a bit tight 🙂

 

I'll get it done soon, most likely within the next couple of weeks.

 

[cteno4]

No worries, the update banners don’t seem to be the intense red ones saying the world is about to end!

 

have a good new year martijn.

 

jeff