Crossposting to LJ throttled; LJ imports slow/failing

[denise]

As LJ has now officially confirmed that they're experiencing a DDoS attack, and a pretty nasty one at that, we've throttled the rate at which we attempt to crosspost entries, and reduced the number of times the process will try before it fails. (It was five tries at an interval of 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes; now it's three tries at 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes.)

You don't need to do anything differently when posting your entries, but if you receive a failure notice after the third try (which should happen around 20 minutes after you try to crosspost your entry), wait a while and then try to crosspost again, by editing the entry, making sure the crosspost box is checked, and saving the entry.

If the crossposting continues to fail after that, just hang tight and wait a day or so before you try again. LJ's operations and engineering teams are doing everything they can to restore access to the site, including restoring the ability to post from elsewhere using the LJ protocol (which is what the Dreamwidth crossposter uses).

Importing from LJ is also affected by this, obviously, which is driving up the import queue. If you can, please consider waiting a few days to import your journal from LJ -- the process is likely to fail right now anyway. If you get a failure in your inbox when trying to import, just hang tight and try again in a few days.

If the traffic situation at LJ continues to worsen, or if the backup gets too large, we may temporarily disable LJ as an import source, in order to let the queue clear out a bit. If that happens, I'll post here about it again!

We wish LJ and the LJ team the absolute best of luck in dealing with this situation, and we hope that they can recover quickly!


EDIT: And the slowness on our end that some people were noting turned out to be another stuck process and Apache in general sucking up too much memory. alierak is monitoring and fixing.

EDIT #2: (1) The problems on our end involve some bug that's causing the webservers to work too hard that we're trying really hard to chase down the source of. If DW is slow or sluggish for you, that's the cause. We've put some measures in place to deal with it temporarily, and we're working on tracing down the root source of the problem. It's not traffic-related!

(2) If you comment, please try to keep it on the topic of Dreamwidth, not LJ -- we'd like to avoid the comments turning into a LJ-bashing session. Thanks, all.

Comments

[kittydesade]

Oh lordy. Um. Thank you for the reassurance? :)

But I honestly don't know when, right now, I would have time. By way of illustration, currently I am studying Russian, German, and Japanese on my own (which is not as ludicrous as it sounds, honestly, there are circumstances!), holding down a day job, prepping two novels for self-pub, practicing two instruments, planning on voice lessons in the winter, prepping costumes for Dragon*Con, um. Squirrels. TUtoring Spanish. And cooking and cleaning and... no, wait, I think that's it. So, um. Spare time, what is that?

Also my sense of design with regard to end-user work is crap. I can throw up a crappy model and take feedback but I am pretty well useless for design.

Um. That said, though, actually, the various factors that make me good at languages also make me pretty quick to pick up coding, so, yeah, if I ever stop running the Red Queen's race, I will totally take you up on that. Also, if you do need help with either writing copy or translating copy into Spanish, French, or possibly Russian or German, I can also help with that! It'd fall neatly under currently allotted practice time, I'm always looking for more things to write or read in languages. (I'm planning on picking up either Arabic Standard or Hindi after Dragon*Con, while I try to maintain/reinforce my Russian, shoot me now.)

[denise]

Oh, man, I hear you! I was asked to be on the Board of Directors for the Ada Initiative recently, and my first thought was "oh my god when will I find the time?" (I accepted anyway. Hey, if you want to get a job done, give it to a busy person.)

We don't currently have plans to do translations (the reasons why are long and complex but basically boil down to, the system to do so is unworkable and the maintenance of the translation once it's done is a nightmare) but we always need people who are willing to write or improve our FAQs and Guides. dw_docs is the comm for coordinating that; right now we don't have an official project lead (although matgb will hopefully be stepping into more of a role soon) but the process for finding and working on documentation-related bugs is here and I've been meaning to give documentation some love pretty soon. So if you wanted to do that, it'd be totally possible to just grab a bug here and there (we run docs changes through Bugzilla too) and contribute when you have a few.

(But, yeah. Don't ever feel like you have to -- your life sounds hectic enough!)

[kittydesade]

(Ah, that is true. That is so, so true.)

Ugh. But, yeah, I think I can do that. At least, on the surface it looks like I can. *peers at comm* Oh yeah, I can totes do that. I know a couple other people who could do that easy, too, but they're doing the same trying-twenty-things-at-once that I am. The short version is about three years ago we decided we were sick of talking about how awesome we could be and decided to actually work on being that awesome. But! Yes. My talents lie in fiction, but in order to actually sell fiction you have to write clear, concise, and often short non fiction, so, sadly... Also my day job sometimes involves writing instruction sheets.

And, um, I'll stop trying to impress you now. >.> Tonight is slammed but I will poke the comm in more detail tomorrow and see what things I can pick up!

[denise]

Hey, no, just talking about your accomplishments is not something to be ashamed of! (I hate hate hate hate hate the socialization that so many people, especially women, get in our society that any kind of acknowledgement or recognition of one's own talents and skills is unseemly bragging and should be avoided. This is why for the past three or four years I've been running a weekly "pride thread" in my personal journal, where we all tell each other about the things we accomplished that week and why we're proud of them, and it's so awesome to read, every darn week.)

Anyway, if you get stuck or have any questions or just need guidance, just PM me; I'm happy to assist. :)

[kittydesade]

... I've seen that! Okay, then! Hah, connection made! This is very true; I suppose I'm not entirely sure where being proud of accomplishments where pride is warranted stops and bouncing and bragging starts. Possibly when you start to hammer the point home with a sledge. Er, anyway. But, yes. Duly noted, yes my captain! And I'll be sure and ask when I run into something, because I'm fairly sure I will. :)

[azurelunatic]

Pride thread is totally the place for bragging. :D

And in the event you do IRC and want to hang out, it's #dreamwidth on Freenode.

[kittydesade]

I'll consider it my "remember, I DO in fact kick ass" time. We really do forget that far too often.

Oh man, I haven't done IRC in the longest time. If I start back up again, I'll remember that. :)