Moving Databases and other fun things
I want my mommy
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
Recapping on the first part of the week.
Started Monday off with mini meetings with George and JR to get them heading in the right direction for this week.
George was finishing the Polls for Political Machine which finally went online today. The new polls are more robust then the poll for WinCustomize and GalCiv. It's no longer limited to only 6 choices and users can also view the stats without having to vote. I always found that a problem when the poll was something that did not concern me.
George and I also brainstormed on giving PoliticalMachine.com a look that corresponds more with the game. We came up with some pretty good ideas and I think it will really help improve the look of the site and give it a much more "Fun" feel to it. So that's what George will be working on for the next couple of days.
Went over with JR on how to implement sub categories into the JoeUser Forums. Definitely a couple of tricky spots as we want to be able to allow serveral levels of sub categories but do that without causing bottle necks with the queriest to properly display and article list that cascades through the sub categories. We think we have a decent solution which only requires the addition of 1 new field.
I also made some updates to SAM to give some extra functionaly to SDCentral that Brian had requested.
1) Description and Icon fields for modules
2) Disable the deletion of old files option for applications and modules
3) Startup Location field for MCP
4) Admin Rights flag for installation
5) Hiding empty fields or fields that evaluate to false in the XML files for SDCentral to reduce the size of the file.
6) Still need to add the FullDownload flag
Tuesday was pretty much a wash as I spent most of the day preparing to move the Stardock Database to a new server. Part of my efforts was to consolodate the database connections for the website into a single include file, per server. Still need to do more work with this but I have considerably reduced the number of files that I need to edit when moving the database.
And today was the big day for the Database move. Everything went fairly smooth. The sites were down for about an hour and a half while making the move. Not too bad but I think I'm getting a good feel for it and if for some reason if I have to do it again I bet I can get that down to about 45 minutes.
I feel a small increase in the speed of the sites now that the database is on a different server. However, I will have to give it a few more days to get a more accurate feel.
Also, I moved joeuser.com to the new server as well. So it resides on the same machine with the database. I can definitely feel an improvement on JoeUser but still JoeUser will occasionally get stuck and lag for a bit.
The WinCustomize machine still is having problems with the CPU pegging at 100% during peak times. Not quite sure why it's doing that but I'm sure it's related to the Skin Libraries. Maybe sooner than later I will need to take some time into rewriting the skin library code to make it more effecient.
Now it's just about time for me to head on out to take my son to gymnastics. Laster.
Started Monday off with mini meetings with George and JR to get them heading in the right direction for this week.
George was finishing the Polls for Political Machine which finally went online today. The new polls are more robust then the poll for WinCustomize and GalCiv. It's no longer limited to only 6 choices and users can also view the stats without having to vote. I always found that a problem when the poll was something that did not concern me.
George and I also brainstormed on giving PoliticalMachine.com a look that corresponds more with the game. We came up with some pretty good ideas and I think it will really help improve the look of the site and give it a much more "Fun" feel to it. So that's what George will be working on for the next couple of days.
Went over with JR on how to implement sub categories into the JoeUser Forums. Definitely a couple of tricky spots as we want to be able to allow serveral levels of sub categories but do that without causing bottle necks with the queriest to properly display and article list that cascades through the sub categories. We think we have a decent solution which only requires the addition of 1 new field.
I also made some updates to SAM to give some extra functionaly to SDCentral that Brian had requested.
1) Description and Icon fields for modules
2) Disable the deletion of old files option for applications and modules
3) Startup Location field for MCP
4) Admin Rights flag for installation
5) Hiding empty fields or fields that evaluate to false in the XML files for SDCentral to reduce the size of the file.
6) Still need to add the FullDownload flag
Tuesday was pretty much a wash as I spent most of the day preparing to move the Stardock Database to a new server. Part of my efforts was to consolodate the database connections for the website into a single include file, per server. Still need to do more work with this but I have considerably reduced the number of files that I need to edit when moving the database.
And today was the big day for the Database move. Everything went fairly smooth. The sites were down for about an hour and a half while making the move. Not too bad but I think I'm getting a good feel for it and if for some reason if I have to do it again I bet I can get that down to about 45 minutes.
I feel a small increase in the speed of the sites now that the database is on a different server. However, I will have to give it a few more days to get a more accurate feel.
Also, I moved joeuser.com to the new server as well. So it resides on the same machine with the database. I can definitely feel an improvement on JoeUser but still JoeUser will occasionally get stuck and lag for a bit.
The WinCustomize machine still is having problems with the CPU pegging at 100% during peak times. Not quite sure why it's doing that but I'm sure it's related to the Skin Libraries. Maybe sooner than later I will need to take some time into rewriting the skin library code to make it more effecient.
Now it's just about time for me to head on out to take my son to gymnastics. Laster.