Azulus

Reverted the header ads, they were too big and not providing any noticable gain. We're going to keep toying with the ads and try to keep a focus on the content.

We're switching our e-mail over to Google Apps hosting which gives us a limited amount of e-mail addresses on their basic (free) plan. If you <3 Bellazon that extra little bit and want to flaunt a bellazon.com e-mail for street cred, we're thinking about opening them up for $1 / mo. If we get more than 20 requests we'll need to go to an auction system as we don't want to splurge too far into our e-mail address pool right now. Post here if you're interested and we'll work something out. These will be hosted via Google's GMail service and will act and look 100% like GMail, only it will have an @bellazon.com at the end. By the way, this would put us at < $20 a month for the e-mail hosting if we get 20 requests, and maybe a bit over with more, so we're not trying to use this to turn a profit or anything of the sort. The monthly fee is mostly to cover our own administration costs (forgot passwords, new accounts, etc).

I'm going to be toying with the ad layout a bit in the next few days. A company called YieldBuild contacted us and they have a pretty interesting service based around machine learning which we want to try implementing. It should stick with the same content in ads as it will be using our existing adsense accounts but the ad sizes and positions might change. Just give a shout if something breaks because of them or the experience becomes unfriendly.

*waves fingers*

Me stealing your credit? Like you have any credit I could steal, lazy bastard.

The thumbs have finished generating and I hotfixed the existing attachments (so theyre loading the thumbs now). Please let us know if this keeps happening as it means that some of the code isn't working on the new web server.

I have a script running and generating missing thumbnails. It looks like we have a lot of historical images w/o thumbs so this should help a bit. It'll likely take a while to finish.

GD should be compiled into PHP on the new webserver and I think that's what's being used for thumb creation now. If problems persist with new images, let me know. I'll see if we can do anything to create those missing thumbs.

I think this should be fixed now. This was a problem created by having multiple web servers (and only one running the search daemon). We're also having some intermittent issues regarding routes to the servers. Hopefully they clear up soon, we're chatting with the datacenter as we speak.

As some of you may have seen, we had 10 minutes or so of downtime 2-3 days ago during our database server switch. Things went "swimmingly" and the new server is handling the database load just fine (that wasn't particularly our bottleneck though). The actual site is now running off the NAS as well now which puts us into position to launch additional web servers beside the one we have now (namely our old database server). I'll keep everybody updated with whatever changes are made, but things are looking good.

We're looking at adding another web server, a load balancer, and a new switch in the next 2-3 days. This should help spread out the load a bit better (we're currently getting about 45 hits per second on a single dual Xeon web server) but it might mean that there will be intermittent down time while we set up the load balancer. We'll try and make things as seamless as possible but you never know. Once the load balancer is in place, we should be able to add new web servers and scale horizontally as needed from here on out which should mean minimal downtime due to upgrades. This might help fix some of the problems the last few days that we've experienced due to the high traffic, we were already at a threshold where more unique visitors was starting to mean a drop off in page views (due to the increased page load time). So having this influx of users wasn't necessarily a good thing for our system stability. -Azulus

Sorry if you see IPS driver errors or anything of the nature today. I noticed, while looking at the MySQL configuration, that we don't have our old optimizations in place from pre-crash. As such, I'm trying to work them back in and get the entire Bellazon database in memory (it keeps it on disk but most reads will be from memory). This should lead to much faster read times across the board, but it may be a bit rocky while I tweak it.

These would be Bellazon oriented by the way, not just a random shirt. I'm thinking of even having a vote here every month on what it should say on the back (logo on the front, text on the back). Then based on the poll, they'd be created and shipped to everybody who wants one. Also, despite the costs, I think we'd only do one run of each shirt. So it'd be a "get it while you can" sort of approach. I don't want to turn Bellazon into a shirt business, in fact, I don't think we'd actually take a profit ourselves off of it. We just want some Bellazon shirts ourselves and a friend presented an interesting idea, so we're presenting here to the community as well.

Alright, I have a friend who can print and ship shirts at a pretty good cost. We're looking at making a couple batches (maybe 1 every month for a couple months) that are purely a "limited edition" sort of thing, once it's been printed we won't make it again. Who's interested?

Nope, today seems on pace for a normal day (and seems quite fast to me).

We're under very high traffic load right now, likely due to another large site linking to us. Traffic was about 50% higher than usual yesterday and looks to be about the same today. Things may slow down but we *should* stay online w/o a problem.

Yeah, I exist, thankfully. I'm not particularly active at the site but azymux and I are consistently working on the underbelly of the site, trying to keep it running and fast. We're generally the ones that fix things when maddog breaks them, he's like a bull in a china shop. -Azzy

Whoops. Ever since we moved the database to it's current server (when we had the crash a while back), it'd been running with a limit of 100 concurrent connections. As the site has become increasingly popular, that's become less reasonable. Sorry that we didn't catch this until now. The limit has been boosted considerably and hopefully those errors shouldn't resurface.

<- omniscient Where's my special member level =-D

do tell....