Hello All,

 

As some of you may know, we have hit a little snag with the wikis.  One of the two primary web servers for www.opensuse.org, files.opensuse.org, and the wiki farm had a major hardware failure yesterday.  After some discussion with the data center, we decided that it would be safer to keep that server out of the rotation, rather than attempt to fix and bring the server back online during the 11.3 release.

 

Of course, this really couldn't have come at a worse time.  As is expected, new releases cause much higher traffic than usual.  Combine this with the fact that we have a brand new wiki out there that has generated a lot of interest and will require a learning curve (i.e. more pages per user), and I think this will probably be one of the highest traffic days that we have ever had. 

 

The silver lining here is that openSUSE invested in some really capable hardware.  I did some tuning of the remaining server to prepare it for a high traffic load, and it should be able to handle quite a bit of traffic on its own.  In addition, I brought the backup server online and tuned it for a higher load as well.  It will be on rotation with the remaining primary server on all the sites, except for www.opensuse.org and en.opensuse.org.  I left those two out so as to not overwhelm the considerably weaker backup server.  With all of this together, I feel confident that the www page and wikis should run smoothly throughout the release.  I have gotten some reports of sporadic slowness of the site, but I believe that was coming from iChain.  Chris did some work on there, and I believe that resolved the problem.

 

I just want you all to be aware that we not at our normal capacity going into this release.  While we should be ok, please do me a favor and check out the site periodically for uptime and responsiveness.  If anything seems out of the ordinary, please contact me right away.  What would be especially useful is if any of you have some kind of web diagnostic tool, and send me any reports if the site is being slow.  Without specific data and being unable to duplicate the problem, I will only be able to pinpoint the problem so far.

 

Thank you,