• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

Technical Side Of Recent Server Changes

Status
Not open for further replies.

anthony

Founder
Technical Talk

Growth has been constant here. Our growth chart for users online and pages viewed is an overall slight and constant increase. As such, this impacts our server. What I had setup was great, it just lacked some of the flexibility needed to match growth. It was always increase this, but not this.

Solution -- I have done a whole bunch behind the scenes that now allows far greater flexibility for what we need here. I can increase / decrease server resources as I need with only a short amount of downtime. All this was done by increasing our flexibility, without increasing costs. In fact, we now have more resources available for longevity, with a very slight decrease in monthly cost.

The server now runs php7 which when compared with php5.6 provides us a 2x performance benefit in serving requests. In other words, PHP is now running at twice the speed in producing the pages on the fly for you when you click x link to show y page.

We now have a gigabit port in use, allowing much greater bandwidth spikes so there is no bottlenecking impact.

We now have 6 cores instead of 4 running the server, which means less chance of any bottlenecks in processing requests between your needs and the solid state drives. We run the latest, stable, secure software to prevent known and past vulnerabilities. We have attempted to close even more vulnerabilities at the server for overall security of private data.

There are now stricter protocols in place for security between our server and your browser. Don't get me wrong, it increases your security, it does not negate all vulnerabilities. That, IMHO, is an impossibility for anything electronic.

There are always teething problems when upgrading server software... which is what has been happening here over the past week. I have probably 99% of issues fixed, leaving the chance for any further issues as slim.

Please continue to report any issues via ticket if you find them, so they can be accepted or rejected as server problems. If you don't report them via ticket, we may not know about them.

Happy PTSD'ing.
 
To demonstrate how some of our most recent security changes have affected overall security here, you can see that what threats were being challenged / blocked vs what is now being challenged / blocked with further security enhancements, is a significant difference. Again, there is no such thing as making anything electronic totally secure, but there is always room for improvement to help overall security of your time upon a site that you deem contains sensitive and personal information to yourself (mental health), and requires a high level of security for your interaction and privacy.

Our system is presently delivering around 97% of all requests as encrypted (approximately 1.3 million requests daily), which is a fairly staggering number to reach with the complexities on websites nowadays, let alone one that allows public input (posting content).

Screen Shot 2016-08-16 at 8.42.41 AM.png
 
I have made some recent caching changes, so please raise a ticket IF you see something weird occurring all of a sudden, and please outline the specifics in your ticket please so I can correct the issue.

What "should" happen and what "does" happen, can be two very different things at times with software.

What should happen is better caching performance for all users, meaning that certain static content that doesn't change is cached longer. Saying that, sometimes with dynamic sites, even caching something you think shouldn't change, sometimes can for various reasons with any self-flushing scripts behind the scenes.
 
There have been some significant performance upgrades happening over the past 12 hrs. If you notice an issue, please take the basic measures such as dropping your cache and cookies at your device, then if the issue persists, please raise a ticket immediately alerting me to the issue.

Likely problems could be something not updating then and there when you do something.

Whilst I have been testing updated aspects today, things get missed. So if you notice something in the next day, chances are it isn't you, its a change I've made at the server to improve performance of page loading.
 
I have made further optimisation tweaks, so if anything acts differently for you suddenly, please raise a ticket immediately with details so I can undo changes.

Optimisation is a slow process of trial and error. The home articles have been highly optimised over the last 12hrs, a few tweaks at the forum.
 
I've now implemented some caching for the database, basically it now stores live data (dynamic content) in cache for faster delivery. Not sure how this will go... either success or epic failure, one or the other. Find out quick enough if users find massive issues or the server falls over in the next 12 - 24hrs.
 
Ok, that was a dismal failure... sorry for the brief outage, my recent experiment was going to collapse the server, so I had to remove the cache and make changes -- and that was during our quiet time, let alone me going to sleep and awaking to madness.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top