Furaffinity Is Down Again
FA is down. They have no idea why.
I lol’d.
Then I got frustrated, because I read through my LJ friends page. People are starting to use FA again, and FA still sucks ass despite having obscenely overbuilt new hardware. So, $16k later, the site’s uptime has seen only marginal, if any, improvement.
Lame. Not surprising, but lame.
August 27th, 2008 at 3:13:44
hense why i went to furry art pile lol
August 27th, 2008 at 4:08:41
…Marginal?
I thought it had been up for 2, maybe 3, weeks before this happened. Seems to me like an 2-3 fold improvement in uptime (improved from ‘down once a week, if you’re lucky) if this is the typical amount post the upgrade…
(…Yeah. Totally not worth $16k worth of hardware, but 100-200% is a wee bit more of an improvement than marginal…)
August 27th, 2008 at 7:35:21
You’d think they would spend some of that server money and pay someone to put the site together correctly. However, that would require logical reasoning.
August 27th, 2008 at 7:47:56
Hasn’t FA been down for a while now? I only know because Rei’s art page is there
August 27th, 2008 at 7:59:55
It strikes me as odd, given the hardware. This means (as is usually the case) that the software wasn’t designed correctly.
A colleague and I built a web content management system in Java for our enterprise, complete with comprehensive security, logging, etc. It’s been used hard by 55,000 users every day for the past 1.5 years and it’s been down ONCE due to software and ZERO times due to hardware in all that time.
And it consists of only two small dual-Xeon boxes with 4GB of RAM each. (One for the web/app sever and one for the database server.)
Mind you, it took both of us the better part of 8 months to write it, but it’s solid solid solid with super error handling and email notifications and that kind of effort is sorely needed if FA is going to be anything useful.
Talented developers are what’s needed - not more hardware. (To a point. All you need is some *basic* reliable hardware to start.)
And no, I’m not interested in developing for FA. I do it for a living and would rather relax when I get home at night. Not to mention the owners of FA are less than friendly towards babyfurs.
And no, I can’t simply take the CMS we did, tweak it for FA-like purposes and throw it on the web for a few reasons:
1.) The code and content is owned by the company, not me.
2.) I don’t have the $$$ to buy a couple of nice servers.
3.) I don’t have the $$$ to co-locate the servers in a reliable data center. (Like Q9 Networks or something like that.)
4.) I’d rather not deal with the administration headaches. Work is for work and home is for not doing work.
Orca _)\_
August 27th, 2008 at 9:22:49
Furry Art Pile is shiny and full of win.
[Edit: Oh, and ArtSpots, too.]
August 27th, 2008 at 9:49:38
It should be obvious that it’s badly designed software when a site that uses a database as a back end cannot implement a search without running into Big O type exponential flaws. That is a warning flag to me.
Also not interested in developing for FA
August 27th, 2008 at 10:19:30
They came back after a month of downtime, with shiny new hardware that was supposed to solve all their problems, do the dishes, and cure cancer. The server they bought could practically run Google, which is significantly more “horsepower” than any website in their traffic range should ever need.
Problem is, their website software is so poorly-written that, despite having the processor capability to be God’s mail server, the site still can’t handle the load it receives.
As Orca says below, what they need are competant developers, and until they get that, the site will continue to suck ass and have weekly downtime regardless of what the site runs on.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:22:58
Oh, I’m not interested in devloping for FA either, unless they pay me (unlikely) and allow me to re-code the whole thing from scratch. Because that’s pretty much the only way they’re going to be able to make it work.
I’ve considered building my own art site, but there are plenty of others trying to fill FA’s shoes, and I have better things to do.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:27:38
Orca, that system you built could run on my little $2,500 server and handle the load you talk about. Very impressive
And, I wouldn’t wish development of that site on anyone I care about, unless they were being paid to do it. It needs to be re-built from scratch, by someone with your level of expertise.
[hugs]
August 27th, 2008 at 10:44:36
This month:
Aug 7 - FA returns from major downtime.
Aug 12 - Database outage, 1 hour.
Aug 13 - Database outage, 1 hour.
Aug 26 - Unknown downtime, 12 hours and counting.
Aug 30 - Scheduled forum outage, estimated downtime 12-48 hours.
The last full month they had before the big outage:
June 2 - Database outage, 3 hours.
June 5 - Database outage, unknown downtime (at least 14 hours).
June 8 - Move to new facility, 12+ hours.
June 13 - Network interruption, 3 hours.
June 19 - Drive failure, 8 hours.
June 23 - Security issue, 45 minutes.
June 25 - Unknown outage (network interruption?), 12 hours.
June 29 - Unknown outage (server reboot, communication issues with co-lo staff), 16 hours
So, yeah, they’re doing better this month than they did in June. However, with the hardware they bought, they still have way more downtime than they should, and this is just the first month after the rebuild. The fact that they’re having this much downtime already is a big red flag; if nothing else, they should’ve purchased a matching pair of primary servers and built a cluster.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:15:25
I LOL’ed.
I’m just picturing legions of social maladjusts sitting at their computer desks foaming at the mouth over FA being down again.
I have to admit though, it is pretty fucked up that it’s so unstable.
August 27th, 2008 at 13:02:04
If I’m not mistaken, FA had purchased 16 GB of RAM for a 32-bit OS. They corrected that issue, but…. get a god damned clue, right? =P
and no, not surprising at all.
August 27th, 2008 at 13:04:06
they asked a friend of a friend of mine (circuitous I know) to help them. He got a glimpse at the code, and said “No fucking way, you’re on your own.”
August 27th, 2008 at 13:58:16
“16 BG of RAM for a 32-bit OS.”
Excuse me for a second.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
August 27th, 2008 at 14:39:18
As stated elsewhere, the problem with FA is that the admins don’t know jack shit about how to write software and manage servers. They’ve had bigger gaffes before (storing passwords in plaintext being about as foolish as one can get), but I find it humorous that people throw 16k at them and it does nothing to fix the problem.
Money can’t solve the enormous idiocy that underlies FA, and besides getting new (competent) developers who can rewrite it from scratch, I’d say nothing (barring act of god) can fix it.
FA’s success is attributed to two things as far as I see. First, it popped into existence right during SheezyArt drama, causing an influx of users. Second, they let people post all sorts of nasty shit on there, and well, furries dig that. I don’t think the quality of the site itself has anything to do with its popularity (except to those who are in their own fantasy world).
August 27th, 2008 at 18:08:17
What Orca said…
August 27th, 2008 at 22:05:35
ROFL
August 28th, 2008 at 0:20:21
Well, that is what they’re doing. Recoding it from scratch I mean. That’s why they haven’t bothered to make any real changes to the current site in the past year or so, in what I’ve come to call the “Trillian Astra approach.” At least the new codebase’s … base … seems to be pretty much finished.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:20:44
Yeah, I noticed that, but I have little hope that it’ll live up to expectations. Call me a skeptic.