New imports temporarily stopped; import queue paused

[denise]

The situation with LJ's DDoS affecting our import queue has only gotten worse since my last post, and delays/slowdowns from LJ means that the queue will not clear anytime soon (due to the length of time each job takes to complete or fail with the extremely slow connections we are experiencing). At this point, it's also possible that the traffic from DW's importer is making LJ's situation worse, which we absolutely do not want to do!

We are therefore temporarily pausing the existing import jobs until the traffic clears up some and we are able to further modify the importer so that it is even less of a load on LJ. We are also temporarily stopping the ability to queue new imports, so that once we bring the import queue back up, it will give the queue the chance to clear a bit. (Also, we'd like to minimize the impact on LJ.)

We will re-enable the existing import jobs in the queue once we are able to make some changes to the importer in order to lower the risk that we're making things worse for LJ even more (reducing the number of times a job will try before it fails, further rate-limiting our queries). At that point, we will let the existing jobs in queue run for a while until we can clear out the queue a bit. Once the queue clears, we will re-enable the starting of new jobs.

It will be at least a few days until we are able to re-enable new imports.

If you already have an import job in the queue, you don't need to do anything. It will be automatically re-started when we bring importing back online. (It's not possible for you to cancel an import once it's started -- sorry!)

If you're importing your journal because you want a backup of your LiveJournal, you may want to try the LJ Archive software, which will give you a local copy of your journal. (You can't upload it into your DW account, but at least you will have the backup!)

If you're trying to import from a source other than LJ, I'm really sorry that the LJ DDoS slowdowns are affecting you! We're working right now on the ability to only pause imports from a single source, rather than all of them. Once we have that, we'll re-enable imports from sites other than LJ, and let the LJ imports sit in the queue until LJ is feeling better.

I'm really sorry about all the inconvenience!

EDIT, 2PM EDT 4/10/11: We have just pushed live a change that will allow us to re-enable the queuing of imports. Imports from sources other than LJ will now be processed as normal. Imports from LJ will be held in the queue and not processed until things calm down a bit on their end.

You can therefore submit an import request to import from LJ and forget about it. We will run the LJ imports once the DDoS and resulting issues clear up a bit on their end -- it could be a day or two, it could be next week; we just don't know!

Comments

[prozac_poetry]

I'm really impressed in how you are supporting lj in all of this

[denise]

Hey, it can happen to anybody! And when it does, everybody rallies. :)

[stormy]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm really surprised dw_maintenance doesn't show up on http://www.dreamwidth.org/ like dw_news does. If people aren't watching this community or the twitter, they're not going to know.

Even an embedded live twitter feed on that page could be handy if that's accessible enough. I rarely use the page, but it is the first thing people see going to dreamwidth.org.

[denise]

Hm, I wouldn't want an embedded twitter feed there -- 90% of the time the latest twitter post was weeks if not months ago -- but I'll see if dw_maintenance can be included in the feed of official posts on the homepage.

It's definitely part of the initial subscriptions that everyone has on creating an account, though, checked by default -- people have to deliberately opt out of seeing the comm on their reading list.

[monanotlisa]

No worries, it's not all your fault; in fact you're just being part of the solution as of now. ;) I'm hoping for the best, for both services.

[discodiva76]

You're doing wonderfully.....I was very lucky to get mine done when I did....the relief is palpable I can tell you!...


Good luck with all the support and hard work you're doing...


Deeds xx

[jae]

Thanks for keeping us up to date! It's really appreciated.

-J

[illariy]

Seconded. :D

[tanhorn]

Last night I saw one one or two errors 418 on LJ page ;-)

[azurelunatic]

And no wonder: I'd imagine they're getting no sleep at all.

[sapphire_rose]

Yay! I was wishing that we could stop import jobs because of overloading LJ, but thank you for pausing the current imports. :-)

[archangelbeth]

I am hugely impressed that
1) DW paused, and /only/ paused, not just deleted, imports, and
2) fixed it so imports from other places weren't paused as well.

That is classy programming and thought!

[holyschist]

This sounds like a good plans!

[nashipants]

I have to say how impressed I am by how much you guys are supporting LJ through this. It's worth a lot of respect to see how you've behaved during this technological blogosphere crisis, and it really just makes me love this place all the more.

I wish everyone could be as supportive and respectful about this as you've been.

[denise]

Hey, it can happen to anybody! I personally have had a lot of disagreements with some of the business decisions LJ has made over the past few years, but that doesn't mean I think they're horrible or anything, and a lot of my friends still work there. I've always liked the way that the Web 2.0 community tends to rally around its own in a situation like this!

[dhamphir]

Thanks for keeping us up to date and for striving to be part of the solution. :D

[sollers]

Seconded on both counts.

[wyldbutterflies]

Is there a way that you can state this on the import page itself? I have a feeling that most individuals coming over or trying to import do not read this community and have no idea what is going on. At least they would know what the deal is instead of getting really frustrated at DW.

[denise]

Yes, there's a note on the import page!

[technoshaman]

Did I mention y'all are awesome? Just sayin'.

[habemus]

I thought it would come to this...

I'm sorry we all panicked and started our import at a time when, obviously, LJ didn't need the additional load...

I feel a bit chagrined I had my part in this, I'll admit. I'm glad you took measures to enable LJ to breathe a bit.

[denise]

It's understandable that something like this would make people go "oh shit I haven't backed up in way too long!" We just want to make sure that we're not adding further to the problem -- we're waiting to hear back from LJ on what sort of rate limiting they'd prefer.

[goodbyemyfancy]

Thanks for the update with this, and a very good call!!

BtW - LJ Archive used to be great for backing up our LJ journals. Unfortunately the software is out of date and no longer works as the author is no longer maintaining it. I used to use this all the time. I tried using this before setting up my import from LJ to here. Perhaps it works for others though.

[denise]

*nod* It's the one I hear about most often from people making recommendations! If anyone has a better option, let me know and I'll edit the post.

[cathalin]

Thanks for the head's up, and for working to help reduce the problem.

[sunrisetr]

Thank you for the heads up!

[romanaorfred]

Thank you for keeping us up to date with all of this, and like others have said, I'm really impressed at how you are helping LJ and how supportive you are. :)

[ifaynsh]

I believe that the most effective way to help LJ is to mirror here the pages that are under attack and to cause fire on yourself. This will reduce load on LJ.

[denise]

Copying and displaying someone else's content without their permission is a very bad thing for us to do, though! (Although someone could always create a feed account for it.)

But we don't have the resources to handle a DDoS of this magnitude -- very few sites do.

[havocthecat]

It's fine, of course! I'm happy to wait to back up my LJ.

[kiviraat]

Your attitude towards everything that's happening over at LJ is commendable. I backed up my journal a few months ago in a matter of minutes, so it's showing how much strain you guys will be under if you're having to take these steps to make things easier for everyone overall.

Keep working hard guys! :)

[phoenix]

Thanks for the update! I'm glad you're pausing imports while LJ recovers - like you say, it could be affecting the site and it needs no further hassle. And like many of the other commenters, I really appreciate that being supportive towards LJ. I wouldn't expect anything less from you, to be honest. Good people at DW :)

[bellakara]

Hope you don't mind but I've reposted this entire news bulletin on my LJ since quite a few people on my f-list have been importing or setting up new DW accounts and I'm not sure they know about this yet.

[denise]

Oh, no, please feel free!

[anne_d]

Thanks for the heads-up!

It's taken me this long to remember to import my lj entries, so I'm obviously in no hurry. :)

[jackiesjottings]

Thank you for being so supportive with all of this. My LJ is in the queue to be backed up. I wish the hackers would go and play somewhere else where they can't do any harm! Like the outer reaches of the universe maybe :)

ps I love the bats mood theme here :)

[keris]

Thanks for the updates! As it happens I did my LJ import in the lull after the first attack they had, and it went straight through (and I don't post enough to justify doing another one for a month or so).

I too am impressed by the support you're giving them. It really shows -- not just says -- that there is no animosity in the DW management towards LJ (unfortunately some users of both have been a little too evangelistic (to put it politely) and giving the impression of gloating, which you are not doing at all). As you say, if they decided to attack DW (or IJ etc.) you wouldn't have any better resources to withstand it.

[sunnidae]

This comment makes me wonder: If someone imports their journal from another site, and then goes back and re-imports it later, is the importer smart enough to compare the two sites & only bring in new content? Or does it replace the entire original import?

Myself, having imported for backup, now I've got it set to crosspost and won't have to import again. I was just wondering.

And ... Thank You Dreamwidth Crew! :D