Maintenance

[Tank]

Hello guys.

The server has a failing HDD which is just being replaced. It's difficult to find out which one of the 2 available is faulty, so we are replacing both.

As both HDDs form a RAID array, synchronization takes some time. Please be aware that the website will be unavailable a couple of times today. IRC will be available again when the whole process has finished.

I will announce further updates in this thread, as well through @sfmldev on Twitter.

Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.

[Tank]

First HDD replaced, second one soon. Expect another 30-60 minutes of downtime soon.

[Tank]

Services are back online. Performance will be at 100 % in a couple of hours, until the RAID has finished synchronizing. :-)

Thanks for your patience.

[Laurent]

Thank you very much for keeping the SFML server healthy

[FRex]

Considering the SFML page is basically all pretty much static stuff and changes infrequently (I know it's PHP but it doesn't ever change per user or anything so it might as well be pregenerated, right?) have you ever thought about moving it to GitHub Pages for speed and stability and lowering the costs?

Of course forum is on PHP doing real work so it has to stay on a 'real' server.

This wouldn't mean a GitHub lock in at all, I don't mean to use their markdown -> HTML built in stuff, just upload a static site to it, static page can be hosted anywhere or even offered for download for offline viewing (maybe some sort of forum archive could be offered for download for offline viewing too? but that's a bit far reaching).

[binary1248]

We already have multiple mirrors that we use to load balance the downloads, one of which I provide. If anyone is willing to set up the infrastructure to balance the rest of the site as well I can provide the extra bandwidth. It is nothing compared to the downloads anyway.

[FRex]

I meant it more as stability and convenience thing. And wouldn't downloads fit into 1GB GH Pages limit too or can't they be put under releases on the repo (I've no idea what limits for that are or how that works but many projects do that already with their binaries)?

[Tank]

We host 3 GiB of downloads, which increases with every release of course.

The only solution is to use a service that's redundant. As long as we have a single root server for serving the web services, adding mirrors won't do anything. Of course we could use DNS round-robin, but that's more of a joke IMO.

Using "good ol'" and capable webspace (read: managed) would solve the issue. GitHub pages is not good enough, we need PHP-enabled webspace for the forum. It doesn't make sense to split services for the main site and forum, when you can get one that handles both.

[FRex]

It was just a suggestion that I thought makes sense, to make main site and downloads basically free from any worry, downtime or costs. I know forum would have to stay on a real server but it's already on en/fr subdomain when the main page is on www/main domain and forum (which is more niche anyway) being down for a few hours while the website and downloads are up is way better than everything being down.

[Tank]

I understand your point. Although looking at how often we had issues, it's probably just not worth changing everything.

Having a project page down is bad, no doubt. But it's not like services are down for hours, every week. The GitHub project is still there as a last resort.

Cost is no factor, everything is sponsored and thus free for us to use. Speed is also no factor, except maybe for people from the US or Asia where latency can add up a bit.

[FRex]

Fair enough then. I just was unlucky enough that last time there were issues a few weeks ago I needed a fresh copy of SFML and couldn't get it from the website so I thought about it then and now again had the idea with this downtime.