stevegrant

They were sold on the understanding that people would be allowed back in stadia in October, and they're refunding people for every game missed. Not sure I see the big outrage, tbh.

I believe Newcastle didn't offer any sort of refund or credit for the games missed at the end of last season either. Pretty shabby, really.

I'd already fixed that! Pretty sure I've found what the latest issue was - somehow during the upgrade process, a table in the database was deleted. It's not a table that's used all that regularly, but there are some background processes that reference it, and so every time those processes would try to run, it would cause an error to be thrown because it couldn't find the table it was referencing. I've manually created the table and suddenly everything seems to be running at lightning speed!

They don't advertise because the service they are providing is illegal It would be like your local drug dealer paying for sponsored posts on Instagram - an easy pointer for law enforcement. Everything is done by word of mouth.

Those recent 500 errors might have been my fuckup

You may have noticed there's been a few changes - I've run the upgrade to the latest version. Frustratingly, it seems as though it's knocked out a few settings, particularly with the colour scheme, so I'll be gradually working on bits and pieces when I spot them. If there are any major bugs, please let me know.

Of course, but you would expect new software to not replicate bugs that were never fixed on the old software - if the current ticketing system is indeed "new", that suggests it's come from a different provider. Bugs are nothing new, but it's fairly implausible for two apparently different bits of software to have the exact same bugs - placing renewal products of everybody in your Friends & Family list in your basket seems like something that would only occur on one company's software (and would be fixed pretty quickly), not something that another firm would manage to replicate.

And as if by magic, my refund has arrived

Given the complications people have seen with the ticketing system (which is supposedly new, yet somehow retains all of the irritating bugs of the previous system 🤔) and online store, I'd probably err on the side of cock-up rather than conspiracy here, but it does unfortunately seem to be becoming a recurring theme.

They sent an email last week (Friday, possibly?) saying they were being processed. Linked to this article, so essentially they're going with 14 working days, which isn't quite what they implied initially.

It's free and easy customer feedback, they'd be mad not to read forums and social media for that sort of thing. They listen to podcasts too... They'll get the figurative temperature of the room from that sort of research far quicker and easier than any sort of organised market research campaign, which should mean they can put things into practice or fix repeating problems sooner.

I'm not actively looking, I've not really got time at the moment anyway, but while it seems stable it seems silly to potentially poke the bear I do wonder whether that post re-indexing process might have helped, but it doesn't appear to be an exact science, frustratingly.

I turned it off as I suspect that might have been having a negative impact on the database (bearing in mind that we have more than 2.6 million posts on here from as far back as 2008) - will have a play around with it over the next couple of weeks to see how much it actually gets used. It might be that it gets limited to subscribed users or something along those lines.

I think that took about 10 days, which is fairly ridiculous Yeah, I'm under no illusions here - it's entirely possible that the problems we've had will return just as quickly as they've vanished. I'm around 95% certain that the core problem is the database schema and how everything fits together, because the database uses the InnoDB engine but doesn't utilise some of the things InnoDB is especially good at (e.g. foreign keys linking tables together, etc), which makes the database quite inefficient. I suspect there are more writes/updates to the database on every post than should be necessary because of that inefficiency, which then causes a logjam and it spirals out of control. When I put the issue(s) to the Invision developers, they suggested ramping up the memory being allocated to the database, which frankly is a bullshit suggestion. A relatively simple forum structure shouldn't need multiple GBs of RAM being thrown at it in order to simply function at the most basic level. Basically they've engineered it badly and the "best" way to fix it from their perspective is to make the database so powerful that the inefficiencies aren't exposed, because otherwise they might have to admit they've fucked up somewhere along the line. There's been a new version (4.5) available as of around 4 weeks or so ago, but they're also onto incremental version 4.5.3 already, so there's clearly still a load of issues which I'm going to wait for them to resolve before we upgrade here - frankly, I've no idea how long the upgrade process might take. Knowing how long it took to convert from the old software, and how long that re-indexing process takes, it could be a matter of days...

Whisper it quietly, but I've done nothing to the setup for the last few weeks - it's just a weird fluctuation that I can't really explain. There's nothing that seems to actually cause the bad spells, it's not a spike in traffic or anything like that, there's no specific user action that I can see that's taking place, etc. Summary: dunno.

I had a load of email notifications this morning from a monitoring system telling me the site was up and down fairly regularly in the space of an hour or so. In all honesty, I've not really done much to have made it more stable over the last week or so, other than starting the re-indexing process which takes at least a week - it's currently 86% of the way through

Brentford in a similar situation too, having had a disappointing defeat yesterday at Birmingham. They were also pretty underwhelming - albeit with a weakened XI due to international call-ups - last week against Wycombe in the first round. I don't see it being a thriller

The weirdest thing is that the load balancer is effectively just a firewall at the moment because we only need one web server right now, so I would have thought traffic just automatically passes straight through, there's no logic for the load balancer to consider. Auto-scaling is in place if it's needed, as that's just a prudent way of setting things up so I don't need to manually change things when traffic increases significantly, as it does at half-time and full-time during games.

We're using an AWS MariaDB instance - not one of the most powerful ones, but it should be plenty for what this place does. In fact, the day/night of the Man City game during the restart when we set our new record for most people online simultaneously, we were actually on a smaller DB instance than we have now and it held firm. There's no real correlation between traffic and performance. I don't think I have the option to do that, but will have a poke around to see if it's possible.

Wonder if that might be as a result of the huge threads in that forum. In theory it shouldn't make any difference as it should only be looking at the topic itself, not any of the posts inside, but the way some of this site works under the hood, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some horrendous query that's slowing it down

Must admit I'm not 100% sure where I'd isolate any of those issues, tbh.