capacity update

[mark]

Just to keep you all in the loop -- the servers have been really busy lately! alierak, one of our sysadmins, has been working on things and found an issue with our load balancer. He fixed that, and that has resolved a number of issues people have had connecting to Dreamwidth during periods of peak load.

(For the technical, the issue was that our connection tracking table in the kernel was set to the default 64k, and we've started peaking past that. He raised the limits.)

We have also submitted an order for two more web servers. This will make things faster by just giving us more horsepower to work with. The rest of the system (databases, memcache, network, etc) isn't anywhere near capacity, but we're running low on CPU on our web servers.

We also have some of our developers working on optimizations for entries that have many comments. That work is in progress and we will continue to iterate to make things faster.

If you have any questions, let me know! I'll do my best to answer them quickly and accurately. :)

Comments

[sharpiefan]

Issues? Nary a one - but you guys are amazing. Thank you for all your hard work, and for keeping us in the loop!

[foxfirefey]

Dear Mark,

How do you kick so much ass?

Hearts.

[mark]

Because I surround myself with awesome people who do most of the work! <3

[montuos]

I love the way DW keeps telling me it has fixed a recent problem before I even noticed it existed! ε>

[chainlink]

THIS.

[citymusings]

Mark,

How are you so awesome?

Thank you for the fix and the update.

[citymusings]

This!

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks, mark and alierak, for keeping DW running so smoothly!

[azurelunatic]

Oh hey cool, glad that's getting tracked down!

[kehleyr]

Hi :-). I was just wondering about a journal I deleted. I'm waiting for it to be purged so I can use the name to create a community with that name. It's been over 30 days since I deleted it and still can't create the community with that name.
Maybe there's a place for me to address this so I apologise if I shouldn't bring it up here :-)!

Oh and the account is "kehleyr_icons", thanks :-D!

[mark]

We do purges at the beginning of the month, and we've manually updated the time to 60 days and sometimes 90 days. We quote the 30 days so people know the minimum time, but it often takes longer to push through a purge.

I might be able to special case and expunge this account sooner, but will have to ask denise. She has a much better grasp of that end of things. Can you open up a support request so we can take a look at it?

[helens78]

+3!

[kehleyr]

I might be able to special case and expunge this account sooner Oh that's not necessary now that I know the time limit :-). I can wait no worries!
Thanks so much for getting back to me :-D!

[brissygirl]

Thanks for the update Mark, continue being awesome!

[musyc]

+nth!

[the]

good to know, bro! we'll show those new servers who's boss.

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you so much. You guys are amazing. Hearts.

[zycroft]

I love you guys. So happy here in my new permanent home on DW <3

[denise]

You probably don't want to do it that way anyway. :) (You need a rename token to use a purged username, even for a community, because there has to be some work to move the old account contents, etc.)

If you want to get it taken care of more quickly, you can actually make a personal journal into a community. Undelete the journal, make sure the journal is empty, then go to the old community creation page at http://www.dreamwidth.org/community/settings.bml?mode=create and put in the journal's username and password. Voila, community!

[iamsosmart]

I am curious as to what the new peak default is. How many connections were you getting to hit the 64k limit?

(I'm assuming enough connections to make me happy that DW's getting so much use. :)

[ashoakandthorn]

Echoing the chorus of thanks in regards to the heads-up. It's muchly appreciated.

[fighting_spirit]

I just want to say thank you for being so awesome. I definitely do not regret taking my business from Livejournal over to Dreamwidth. The fact that you actually *gasp* listen to your userbase makes me feel good about paying for an account here. :)

I would like to ask one question, although it's not related to this update. Are there any plans in the works for Dreamwidth to offer extra icon packages independently of purchasing a paid account? Livejournal has small packages of 5 icons for $2 per year, up to 15 extra icons for $6 a year. If Dreamwidth offered this, I would gladly shell out for most of my RP journals.

[denise]

We definitely want to offer icon add-on packs (believe me, we know people want more icons *G*) -- it's going to be mark's next big project! -- but it's not likely we'll let people buy just icons, without having a corresponding paid account, at least not at first and probably never. You can see an explanation about why in our old pre-launch business FAQs (most of which are still applicable!) and in two messages to our old pre-launch discussion mailing list. The first of the two is more a general explanation about why "build your own" paid account features wouldn't work for the way the site's designed and coded; the second of the two is specifically geared towards icons and why you can't buy just icons.

[ivorygates]

<3

[kitters]

^^^^^^^ <3

[kitters]

*HUGS ALL DW STAFF*

[desh]

You accidentally pasted the same URL for both of the "two messages" links. I'm really curious to read both, if you can find the other one as well.

EDIT: Nevermind, got it!

irrelevant topic goes here

[more_than_words]

each time I see that icon I keep waiting for the eyebrows to wiggle. Other than that, carry on with the kick ass service, DW!

[denise]

Oops! this is what happens when you aren't paying attention while copy/pasting :P

[jb_slasher]

DW <3

[jevana]

... I found this entire thread to be very informative even when I wasn't looking for the info. Wow. Thank you for being so helpful to others ♥

[denise]

Glad to be of service!

[w_alchemist_jen]

Definitely this!

Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[frith]

Wow! That is so cool!

Re: Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[denise]

Although it's probably irresponsible of me as a business owner to discourage people from buying rename tokens and thus giving us money. ;)

Re: Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[frith]

LOL! Especially since I just pasted your instructions into my journal and set it free! But this is the kind of user-friendly interface that drew me here in the first place. ^_^

Re: Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[sepdet]

Don't worry, we're all falling in love with and plugging Dreamwidth for you, so superior customer service does help indirectly. We have a very vested interest in supporting you and making sure you keep taking care of us like this!

[kehleyr]

Oh it worked like a charm! Thank you sooo much for all of your help!

[denise]

Glad to be of service!

Re: Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[twelfth_sign]

Hey, your being kind enough to help like that just made me sign up for a year's worth of paid time. :)

[bloodybrilliant]

You guys are awesome! Thanks for all of this. I'm planning to get a paid account as soon as I can afford to because this is the kind of place that I want to pay for. Thanks for the work and dedication and for the upfront service you guys give!

[jld]

Out of curiosity: connection tracking as in the thing that's used for NAT and stateful firewalling with iptables?

[mark]

Yup. We use it because we've had issues with people opening many simultaneous connections, so we do some poor man's DoS protection using iptables. It's very crude, but it seems to work OK most of the time.

Re: Presto! From personal journal to Community!

[lliira]

I worked retail for years, and this kind of thing is what gets customers coming back. It also tends to get customers to buy more stuff right away, in my experience. Treating customers the way you want to be treated, as one human being interacting with another human being = monies.