Posted on 10/23/2012 3:58:44 AM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
The 4th and final of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates have come and gone for 2012.
Here are the three things we can walk away with.
- Romney can't lose a debate coin toss, going 3 for 3. Which of course means nothing.
- Obama gets more moderated debate time, going 3 for 3 in the time column. Which of course means nothing.
- Free Republic crashes before any debate and doesn't get back to normal until dawn the next day.
I would like to state that I have been here since the 2004 election season. I can't lay claim to being an old timer here compared to some of the posters here. I can safely say though that I am not a spur of the moment account meant to come here and spam, insult and run away.
Here's my point; Free Republic is in danger of not being relevant and it's purely because of technical reasons.
I know your technical team or advisor is trying like mad to isolate why this site is unavailable for hours on end surrounding the debates this year. It's not working.
This debate season for Free Republic has been the equivalent of having a TV network go out for a wild card round, divisional round and conference or league championship. The network knew the times of the contest, they knew tons of people would be watching, they knew where the technical problems might arise yet failed 4 times over the course of every scheduled event.
Now the Super Bowl of American politics is 2 weeks away and the same team that has aired loading screens for every head to head political contest this year must realize this simple fact; if you're not up and running on election night 2012 you might as well close the door on any thought of continuing your political relevance.
Online communities do not build themselves overnight but they can collapse overnight. As inconceivable as it may be this could be a swan song moment that you were warned about, tried to prevent yet ultimately could not control. If your traffic can't get to your site, you have no site.
If you fail in giving voice to this community during what should or could be a glorious night for America your role in history will be noteworthy, just like print edition of Newsweek's coverage of the Presidential inauguration in 2013. Non-existent.
History will indeed be made on November 6th because of the nature of the event. The question Free Republic needs to determine is if it is going to report history or become part of it.
BTWL Should this idea come to fruition, and should you and John decide it’s a solid platform, I would love it if you, Jim, would be the Overall Site Moderator, as you are here. Your moderation is pretty good here. Certain people can complain, but on the whole, you do great. Plus, you have the experience that only time can bring.
You could even ban me, the creator of the software, and I would abide by your decision — even as I still supported the software. :)
JohnRob, I will definitely need to pick your brains about the hardware and loading issues. Obviously, your personal well-being comes first, so do what you need now.
I’m not sure relevancy is measured by ability to run live threads during events. Live threads are mostly just the choir backslapping itself, not terribly relevant, entertaining sometimes, but not relevant.
Well you believe what ever you want, but FR had over 11 millions hits on a previous Presidential election day.
You really want me to list all of them?
No, just the ones that get over 11 million hits a day. Without advertizing.
DU gets more traffic worldwide
Well duh.
Daily KOS gets a LOT more traffic
Well double duh.
...their user interface is worst [worse?] than ours.
Thanks for noticing.
...you like living in an interent era...
I don't live in the internet, I live in a house on a street in America.
You on the other hand, live in an internet era? With the help of the ERA??
Don't like FR? Well you at least have 929 websites where you would be more happy, cool.
I hear ya, this looks like a copy&paste post btw. ;-]
I’m sure the offers have been made before..
We have a lot of tech folks in the bay area that may be able to assist pro bono. Lord knows I’ve battled a server or two in muh datacenter days.
John has done a remarkable job of assembling and keeping what has been put together for as many years as he has and done software development and made a living at the same time.
To me, an aging techrat, I understand the scale of the issues at hand, from hardware to software, just keeping the rats from chewing thru the cables and the birds nesting in the disk arrays is a full time job with the riff raff that rolls thru here all the time.
but.. imho, what ails FR is not what it runs on today.. it’s what hits it out of the blue every time major events ramp up, between DoS (denial of service) and a rapid uptick in volume ,, bottlenecks and glitches happen.
I admit I get frustrated like a lot of folks but I understand what we’re up against too. If FR is that trivial of a site to so many, why do so many seek to attack it or take it down?
Good luck to John as he plugs in the new servers and like I say, folks are ready to do more than send mo’ money, hands are standing by too. ;-]
Back to the battle!
GiDDyup!
-PJ
“Hits” are in the eye of the beholder software. A more relevant number to me is “pageviews.” We delivered 1.2 million pageviews yesterday. We’re currently delivering about 30 million pageviews per month. We delivered over 77,000 pageviews per hour at the peak last night during the debate. That seems to be the performance knee at this time. Our system performance declines sharply whenever the traffic goes over that point.
We thought of that. One of my idea-guys came up with the concept of storing excerpts for a 404 situation, and if 404 is found, go to the server and pull the excerpt. That only has to happen once, otherwise it can be a time killing bottleneck. Maybe autoretry the thing every week or so.
Laz, I think you have a great concept, but your execution will doom it. Installing a client on someone's computer is just asking for trouble. You will have to support it on all the different platforms, and the minute ANYTHING goes wrong while it is running, you'll be blamed for it.
No more so than any other app running on a computer. But I do hear your concern.
However, I think you can do it in a browser frame. You should be able to render an article within a frame, and then put additional content above/below it. The user would download the article from the original source into their browser, and your server would never handle it.
I lose a lot of joybuttons with that approach: No highlighting or pointing cross frame, unless I ramp up on Silverlight, and I'm not a SL guy yet. Although I could become one! LOL
Although, I must admit, humblegunner is slightly more evil. :)
Jim
Thank you for the detailed update.
I have no computer expertise whatsoever - so this suggestion is probably way off base. But, I’m wondering if you could eliminate some of the posting history, private mail and other ‘home page’ niceties. All that stuff must take up a huge block of memory. Who goes back more than just a few days on their own history, much less anyone else?
Kind regards to John - and God’s blessings.
sod
If you haven't written a book yet, sir, I ask, what in the world are you waiting for? The story of the founding and growth of Free Republic would be of interest to at least as many people as there are registered here...
That's just because I always click "Allow" on the upgrades.
When John reports that "all the dials are fine", but things clearly aren't fine, he is missing something important. Without a monitoring tool that collects all the relevant information, he may never see it.
Unfortunately, I would be limited in what I could do in your current implementation. But, there is a great deal of information that typically isn't watched, and should be.
There's nothing I could do in the next two weeks, anyway. What I would suggest has already been offered by several people (including me) over the past month or so: find a way to offload the live threads to a chat server, ideally one integrated with your authentication. Use a Javascript client that can be launched from a browser.
A quick search yielded this: http://www.webappers.com/best-free-javascript-chat-clients-for-your-website/
Thanks to you all, and God bless you.
Thank you both very very much for Free Republic.
I have seen a lot of complaining from my fellow FReepers and I am surprised that I have not seen an “official” response. If there has been one, can someone post a link for me?
I hope to learn more in this thread....
130
Of course Humble is evil.
He’s had The Coffee.
It’s what powers his Blogger Overlord armor I hear.
He didn’t offer you any coffee when you met, did he?
Well, I’m prototyping some new software designs myself (in my spare time). Don’t have it ready for public demo yet though.
Nope, Laz never made it. Darn the luck.
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