For two days I have been trying to access USCF vouchers and they never appear. Also, I went to purchase a a membership batch and it was frozen for 30 minutes and failed.
Given the rather vague information, I don’t see anything obvious in the logs.
If you want to provide more detailed information as to what you were doing and when, please send it to me in email rather than post it on the Forums.
Not to sound like a broken record, but the USCF is operating its database on a server purchased in early 2007. Since then we’ve over doubled the size of our database, and have added many tasks to the daily workload (with several more in various stages of planning or development.)
In addition to concerns over a catastrophic system failure when something wears out, I have expressed concerns that we could be near the point where we need to carve out several hours a day when access to USCF data from external sites (including the website, membership webstore and TD/A) is disabled, just to get the daily maintenance window in.
There was a system problem at the USCF office earlier today (Mon, Jan 14th) that caused a slowdown and then a restart of the database at around 11:30 AM.
The USCF has a backup server, right? And I assume database backups are made at least daily, if not multiple times a day?
Yes, we do several types of backups on a daily schedule (some more frequently than that.)
We’ve apparently reached a point on the current server where the overall workload causes it to get bogged down when too many tasks are trying to run at the same time, and that happened some time overnight.
We’re looking into doing some load re-scheduling (including when various backups and other system maintenance tasks run), but it may just mean that we will have to hold off on scheduling some on-demand tasks (like large email blasts) at certain times during the week, and we may even need to declare some ‘maintenance windows’ during the week when things like the webstore and the TD/Affiliate Support area will be unavailable.
Not related to the above, but there will probably be some downtime on Wednesday (Jan 16th) as we are hoping to upgrade the USCF office’s Internet connection then.
We are supposed to have quotes for system refurbishment at the Feb EB meeting.
I have another unique problem with the USCF Website that perhaps someone can shed some light on. On my home computer under regular Internet Explorer, I am able to get the “USCF Issues”, but when I go to other computers or Google Chrome on my home computer, I am not able to get “USCF Issues”. Any Opinions on this, or is just me?
David A. Cole
Sounds like an issue with logging in under the other browsers.
Does it say USCF MEMBER in the box in the left hand column?
I haven’t tried it with Google Chrome (and it could be specific to one release of it, so we’d need more details to even hope to duplicate that), but I routinely access the Forums from at least 4 different computers.
The following are OS/browser combinations through which I access the Forums on a regular basis.
Win7/IE9
Win7/IE8
Win7/Chrome (most recent version auto-updates)
Win7/Firefox (most recent version auto-updates)
Win8/IE10
Win8/Chrome (most recent version auto-updates)
MacOS 10.7/Safari 6
iOS 6/Safari 6
Android 4.1.1/Most current test browser (right now, Dolphin beta)
For the record, I haven’t experienced any of the issues described in this thread.
My first hunch would be that the security settings or cookie settings are set too high on the browsers that won’t access the forum.
That’s a good point. I know a couple of times I’ve had ‘private browsing’ set and since the browser doesn’t access or save cookies in that mode the USCF Issues forum isn’t present.
That’s the whole problem – he is unable to experience any Issues.
Bill Smythe
Some may well argue that’s a feature, not a bug.