The really scary part is how close Doug is to the truth..

Ever since i met Sage on the CDT and she taught me the NOLS way of "cleaning up" after potty time.. I have not used a single square of toilet paper on the trail or in my place.

Yep, the yellow sponge is for dishes.. the blue sponge is for..

So, who want to come over for dinner?

I'm making brownies for desert (yes, had to go there!)

Seriously, if you got "it" on your hand would you rather wipe it off or wash it off?

I know, i know, don't get it on you hand... Yada Yada Yada.

I'm gonna have to get back on my medicine...glug, glug

It certainly seems like the server response time has slowed to a crawl, again.

--B.G.--

Now at 20-25 seconds.

--B.G.--

Just reread the thread after my last response. I want to make it clear that I do not have a sewing room. I always was horrible at sewing and since my detached retina episode I don't have binocular vision close than 3 feet. Forget sewing! It's a combined computer and backpacking gear storage room!

Anyway, BPL is currently approaching the speed of our native western Oregon fauna. I haven't tried the New York Times lately (I ran out of my free article allowance for the month).

"First of all, I am NOT defending any poor service. No way."

Roger, if it were network congestion leading to the InfoGears node, then the InfoGears index page itself would show that congestion. But it doesn't. It is responding normally. That suggests that the BPL server there may be overtaxed. So, somebody needs to spend some money to upgrade something. Of course, the long term solution may not involve InfoGears itself. When I see errors all over the InfoGears site, that suggests that it may be overtaxed, itself.

Tick Tock.

--B.G.--

I respect you and all that Roger, you know that, but this issue has got nothing at all to do with anything other then the server that BPL is being served from has reached its limit of load balancing. Obviously we out here have no idea if BPL is being hosted on a dedicated server or a co-hosted server or a virtual server or whatever. But in the end, its reached its limits.

I have faced this issue dozens of times over the years with my own websites. At some point the concurrent connections to get to be too much and you start having longer query times, and bottlenecks lead to more bottlenecks. You can pay a developer a whole lot of money to try to optimize the code. You can spend even less money and get a newer server and resolve the problems without touching the code. Obviously both is the idea solution.
A dedicated *managed* server these days is under three hundred bucks a month. (managed server being one where a companies deals with keeping the server updated and so forth).

Middle of this year I had to upgrade servers running my largest blog service provider website. It was facing the same exact issues that BPL is now suffering - and BPL is suffering it very hard... try opening up a half dozen or dozen tabs all loading BPL pages and see just how bad the load balancing on the server is suffering right now.

What kind of caching is taking place?

What kind of IO usage is there on the server?

What kind of long queries are there?

What are your max connections set at?

There are folks out here that really do know how to help you guys solve these issues, with experience with facing and resolving these issues. It would be stupid of BPL to not take advantage of these resources and resolve the problems that plague all of us that use this website.

I know nothing about servers, caches (other than water), I/O, etc.

I do know that I just did an eBay search that returned 2.5 million results in about 1/2 the time it took to get this thread to open up.

Now, to me, that would indicate that something is broken on BPL.

Come on guys, feed your squirrels some more peanuts so they can crank up their speed in the cage.

BPL Server and Support Services

Don't let Roger Caffin see that.

--B.G.--

> A dedicated *managed* server these days is under three hundred bucks a month.
Indeed. But does BPL have that sort of money available?

I am sure everything could be solved with LOTs more money. If only.

Cheers

" But does BPL have that sort of money available?"

Well if the MLifers were receiving the annual reports we thought we paid for we would know.


Customers have been complaining about the software, service forever. You guys are wasting your time.

Piss poor state of affairs.

"Indeed. But does BPL have that sort of money available?"

Check my math, but I calculate that 180 annual membership renewals should cover $3600/year for a dedicated, managed server. There are a lot more renewals than that, if I'm not mistaken. To be perfectly honest, what is more important to a website than a server and bandwidth adequate to handle the activity the website generates? What actually has more priority in the current scheme of things.

"I am sure everything could be solved with LOTs more money. If only."

$3600 is chump change these days, and a small percentage of the revenue this website generates. This is a bold statement, one I invite BPL management to disprove.

But does BPL have that sort of money available?

It seems to me that we have had a goodly number of new subscribers (M and MLIFE) join in the past few months. I assume this means that BPL is bringing in some money, where it should (could) do just as you say, John.

Slllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwed to a crawl early this morning and resulted in dual and triple posts.

Canceling the post does nothing because the post finally goes through and we have to delete the multiple posts after the fact. :-(

Seems a little better now.

Party On,

Newton

Edited by Newton on 01/07/2013 06:38:06 MST.

ryan@ryanjordan.com

ryan@backpackinglight.com


Anyone try e mailing Ryan?

How about we all do it at one time?

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