Please Remove The "We're Having Difficulties" From visitors view

penguindriver

cptkoi wrote:

Its great that the guys at SM are on the case and that at least the world can still see our images etc

However they say you discover how good the service is when things go wrong.

Were now at almost 3 hrs of down time and I don't find that acceptable even if it is only once in a blue moon.

Hopefully lessons will be learnt, investment made, procedures changed to ensure better fault tolerance and customer experience in future.

H

If what happen I think happened with a database and just imagining the size of the database with terabytes of photos and other data, it is going to take a liitle while to restore and verify the new database they are putting in place. I am backing up Andy and the guys working in the trenches at SM 1000%. I fully realize that you want to be able to upload and to sell prints, but when a database goes down the size of theirs in a cluster, it takes a little while to get it back going again. Believe me I have been there and done that.

David Staggs, MCSE

DrDavid

penguindriver wrote:

Believe me I have been there and done that.

Yup.. Backups are nice, but, the reality is that going to the backup isn't the first thing you want to do... Remember, all backups are historical. They don't have *everything* that was added since the backup occurred. I'd rather have a few hours of downtime vs. losing all the work I did in the last day or two.

I remember one time that a server of mine decided to lose its partition table for some unknown reason. I was able to restore all the data (by manually reconstructing the partition table! (now, that was fun ).. But, it took almost a whole day to do. Still faster than the alternatives though. And, I didn't lose a single byte of data.

David, [insert lots of letters, degrees, and certs here]
(Are we now putting all of the alphabet soup after our names on here to punctuate that we know what we're talking about? )

cptkoi

DrDavid wrote:

You're right. It's 3 hrs of downtime. But, they are fixing a database table that probably has a few hundred-million rows! It takes a few minutes to fix that!

I guess they could go to their backups, and you'd lose any work you did for the last few days, but, that wouldn't be any better. And, there's no guarantee that the backup has a pristine version of the database either.

Bottom line; let them work, and I'm sure they'll get the site up as fast as possible. They don't want to be down either.

David

Thanks for the insight, bottom line, they are working on it and I am registering my disappointment.

H

Andy

Thanks folks and sorry again:

http://smugmug.wordpress.com/

we're out of read only mode.

DJT

Andy wrote:

Onethumb hasn't moved from his computer in three hours he's doing everything humanly possible to restore the site to full read/write service level, just as fast as he can.

I can see Onethumb with a bedpan beside the computer...

SENDING VIBES OF GOOD CODING TO ONETHUMB RIGHT NOW! FEEL THE VIBES.

Someone go get Onethumb a Mountain Dew and a back massage when smugs backup. Maybe Barb can give him that BIG HUG she sent my way.


A song from my childhood

Be patient, be patient,
don't be in such a hurry;
When you get impatient -
you only start to worry.

Remember, remember,
that God is patient, too;
And think of all the times
when others have to wait for you!

timnosenzo

Looking good, nice job guys.

The fact that the site is accessible and online during "outages" is something that shows how above and beyond SM goes to please its customers. Its a great system.