Folksy Status

Folksy server updates completed

dougfolksy — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:13:04 +0000

Hi — we’ve finished with the server updates for Folksy, for now.
The site was in maintenance mode for around 1 minute, as we thought.
Hopefully that meant inconveniencing an absolute minimum of people, but our apologies to anyone who did notice the downtime.
Cheers, and thanks for bearing with us,
Doug.

Folksy briefly entering maintenance mode at 14:00

dougfolksy — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:26:41 +0000

Hi — further to our last message, we’ve realised that a couple of the updates we need to run will require us putting Folksy into maintenance mode briefly, at 14:00.
This should be for a maximum of 1 minute, to minimise inconvenience, but as ever, sorry if you are inconvenienced by that.
We’ll let you know when we’re done tinkering.
Thanks,
Doug.

Updates to the Folksy servers

dougfolksy — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:12:46 +0000

Hi — we’ll shortly be running a couple of updates to the Folksy servers. Service shouldn’t be interrupted for more than a minute or so at the most, but we thought we should let you know.
I’ll update the status blog once we’re done & everything is running okay.
Cheers,
Doug.

We’ll be doing some work on the forums servers today

dougfolksy — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:55:18 +0000

Hi — just to let you know that we’ll be doing some work on the forums servers, today.
We don’t anticipate that this will impact the performance of the servers, but thought we should let you know, just in case.
Thanks,
Doug.

Issues with item images not appearing — update

dougfolksy — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:44:12 +0000

Hi — just to keep you informed, the issue with item images not appearing seems to have resolved itself.
We’ve made our image service host aware of the issue, as have other clients of theirs who noticed the same issue, and we’ll let you know of any official response.
But in the meantime, images have seemed okay for a couple of hours, now.
Thanks again for your patience,
Doug.

Item images not appearing

dougfolksy — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:05:03 +0000

Hi — we’re aware that some of the item images are not appearing for some users. We are currently looking into this issue.

As best we can tell, the issue is with the service that hosts our images. We have contacted them about the issue, and will get back to you as soon as we know anything more.

In the meantime, sorry for any inconvenience.

Thanks,

Doug.

Search index issues last night / this morning

dougfolksy — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:52:05 +0000

Hi,

As many of you will be aware, there was an issue with the search index running from last night into this morning.

This was caused by the search indices on our servers getting out of sync with each other, and was fixed this morning by restarting the index services and re-indexing all items. Some people have reported that updating their items fixed the problem – whilst this may have worked, this is no longer necessary, and the problem has been resolved for all users.

The search index technology is still relatively new to the Folksy stack (we put it in place just before this last christmas), and is still being actively developed and tuned.

We are currently upgrading all our se rvers to ensure they are running all the latest search-related packages, with the aim of making issues like the one that occurred last night a vanishingly rare event. Once these upgrades are in place, we will also be looking at improving our automated server checks and alerts, so that our development and support teams can be alerted to respond much more quickly to any future issues with the search indices, just as we currently are to server outages.

I hope this post answers some of the questions that our users undoubtedly have, and offer my apologies for any inconvenience that the search index issues caused.

Thanks for your patience,

Doug.

Work going on on the forums servers this evening

dougfolksy — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:31:22 +0000

Hi — just a heads up that there will be some work ongoing on the forums server this evening.

We don’t expect there to be any service outage, but thought we’d best let you know we were on there, in case.

Thanks,

Doug.

Folksy items index upgrade completed

dougfolksy — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:18:34 +0000

Hi — I guess the night owls will have noticed that Folksy’s back up and running, but in case you hadn’t, she’s back up.

The upgrade seems to have gone well, we’ve been testing and watching it, and everything seems okay for now, so we’re going to say goodnight.

Naturally, we’ll be monitoring performance all through the day tomorrow, too.

Once again, thanks for bearing with us whilst we undertook the maintenance.

‘Night!

Doug.

Reminder of Folksy maintenance mode at midnight tonight

dougfolksy — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:28:50 +0000

Hi — this is just a reminder that the site will be going into maintenance mode at midnight, tonight, to allow us to upgrade the items indexing service.

Thanks for bearing with us,

Doug.