User:Emily Diehl/Journal/August 2008

August Journal Archive

Friday, August 22, 2008

Well, the next few hours are my final bits of time in the studio before my trip to nvision. I'll be archiving my talk page, sending off some final emails about wiki stuff, and cleaning things up before I take off to get packing for tomorrow morning's flight to San Jose.

I haven't slept more than three hours in days. I pretty sure my bloodstream is about 90% coffee right now.

Anyways, I'll be online and monitoring email even when I'm gone, so I'll be able to pick up bugs and pass them along remotely. My response time may be slower, though, since I'm out of the office. I'll fly back in on the day of PAX, so I'll jump right into that

See you guys on Friday! Hopefully I'll meet at least a few folks at our PAX after-party.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Coming soon to a wiki near you...MediaWiki version 1.13 (now with LuceneSearch) and other assorted awesomeness! (I totally said that in the movie preview guy's voice, btw).

All silliness aside, I just wanted to let you all know that we're going to be testing out 1.13 on our staging servers over the next few weeks, and (after we're sure that nothing's going to blow up), we'll push it live over here. This will give the site LuceneSearch functionality, and will allow us to add other 1.13+ functions (like your requested Category tree extension...I saw that but haven't had a chance to comment yet). We'll also be rolling out those new servers sometime in the near future (I have no timeframe still, but it's sooner than last week's post nonetheless ;))

Poke, we'll also be performing db maintenance at that time, so we'll be fixing the namespace issue you've pointed out then too.

If anyone has any pressing concerns or any more tech requests, make sure you get them up here so I can pass them along to the IT team.

Hooray for upgrade goodness!!

Friday, August 8, 2008

I’ve been pretty quiet around here lately, so I wanted to pop in and give you guys updates on a few important things. I’ve meant to all week, but this particular week threw lots of curveballs my way.

Firstly, wiki business!

There have been a few recurring, hard-to-track issues that have been plaguing us since the start of the site, so I have an update on a couple of them for you. Here goes.

Quick note on caching (and a brief commentary)

Every time there has been a complaint related to caching (or any tech issue), I’ve passed it along to my primary IT contact in charge of wiki stuff (who also checks that page himself). He, in turn, has been working closely with folks from Network Engineering and other departments to figure out exactly what’s going on. As I’ve mentioned so many times before, these caching issues are wicked hard to track down because this site runs on its own set of dedicated web servers, and relies on a variety of other systems that handle load balancing, caching, and scaling. Anyways, it’s been tough because changes will be made to address issues, and I’ll pass the news to you, and then something else unexpected will pop up that will have to be tracked down by a lot of people. It’s part of the process of maintaining such a massively trafficked, dynamic site like a wiki, but I know it’s frustrating at times when you’re just trying to get stuff up on the site.

I wanted to mention this to you guys because I honestly can understand when people get upset to find the wiki’s at a crawl or doing weird things (like caching unexpectedly). This site is massively important to me on a personal level, so I can assure you that even when I’m silent and extremely busy at work, I pop in multiple times a day to check on things, and that we’re constantly discussing ways to make the wiki run smoother and better than ever.

With that being said, here’s a run-down of where we’re at.

On caching

As mentioned, there has been a LOT of people working to figure out the best solutions for wiki caching. As you can probably understand, shutting off all caching for the site would lead to all sorts of potential issues, since caching acts as a buffer to prevent the wiki databases from getting slammed with massive amounts of requests.

As we’re finding, though, too much caching really poses a problem on sites (like wikis) that need to have information constantly updated and current to function properly, so they need to be treated differently than other websites.

I’ve received news today that we’ve basically decreased the server cache times drastically, so there is a strong belief that this recent update should be enough to alleviate the pain we’re all seeing when things just won’t clear for hours and hours (or longer).

I know that I’ve said this same thing a bunch of times in the past, so I’m knocking on wood like crazy here, hoping that this time will be a full success so we can stop having to worry about this stuff. I’ve been asked by the teams involved to keep a very strict eye on the issue and report anything that continues to be an issue. Because of this, I am going to clear off all of the issues on the report a wiki issue page and archive them. We’re starting a new era of testing, so I want to make sure that things are a clean slate for monitoring.

If anyone notices anything caching in a bad way, please let me know right away on that page so I can send it over to the guys working on this problem.

On the odd nightly hiccup

Wyn pointed out something strange both on the support page and on my talk page regarding the wiki seeming to hiccup consistently at a certain time of night. She thought that this could have been due to some kind of backup process being done at that time.

When I first saw the issue and passed it along, it seemed to be related to the plethora of caching issues that we were running into at the time. I checked with my contacts, and the backup times didn’t seem to coincide.

I noticed repeated complaints about this in recent changes, so I passed this along again recently to make sure I wasn’t crazy. This time I got the response back that yes, there actually ‘’’’is’’’ an automatic backup being done on the wiki at that time. So, long story short, I was completely wrong on this one and gave misinformation. Wyn, I’m sorry for being dense on this one =)

Anyways, the team is taking a look to see if there is anything that they can do to soften this performance slowdown. In the meantime, if you guys think we should put a notice up at the time of the backup process to explain what’s going on, I can get the information you need. Just let me know.

On overall wiki performance

The amount of traffic that this site gets is staggering, and the traffic spikes to the site every patch day are downright epic.

As I mentioned before, we have a large number of servers completely dedicated to nothing but this wiki, but we’re all aware that it’s pretty throttled at peak times. Due to the importance of the site, I’ve received word that we’re in the process of adding a few more robust servers to the mix. We’ve also made various server-side changes that I’ve been told should greatly help performance on the site.

The changes I mentioned are in place now, so those should help quite a bit. I don’t have an exact timeframe for the addition of the new hardware, but that’s coming very soon.

Anyways, I just wanted to make it clear that we’re not unaware of the slowdowns (we’re using the wiki too, so we see them right away), and we’re working on making them much better.

Wrapping up

That’s about all I have on the wiki technical front. I’m going to be working on clearing out my talk page questions as time goes on. Unfortunately, my team is in high gear on several large projects so I’ve been spending a majority of my time in meetings, planning/scheduling/tracking, and working on things myself. Recently, I’ve been asked to take on the additional responsibilities of producing not only web stuff, but marketing and visual services as well, so I’ll have an even larger list of items I’ll be responsible for.

Please be patient with me if I’m slow to reply to things. Even if I don’t have the time to respond to stuff during the day, I’ll make sure I carve out time to get back to folks on stuff and work on projects.

Speaking of those, I’m still working out details of the bigger wiki projects like skill audio and render requests. The audio requests project is still pending internal discussions about Poke’s proposal for writing a custom player for audio on the wiki, and the renders are pending me getting some of the ever-elusive free time. I’ve been coming in on weekends, but I always get sidetracked with other things that I need to take care of before the week’s start.

Random fun stuff

I’m going to be helping out in our booth at PAX this year (I love the shows…even if they’re exhausting). If anyone has a mind to, swing by and say hey! I’d love to meet fellow wikiers.

On my gaming front:

I switched my necro’s SS build for the first time in months after yesterday’s update. I’m testing out a new blood build with Vamp Spirit as my elite. I’m digging it so far. I’m trying to get Linsey to help me finish some of the bonuses I need because I need to fill out my HoM before GW2. She’s way more pro than I am, though, so I’m scared I’ll just get her killed. A lot.
I’m a few personal days at the end of the month to take a brief trip to the big Nvidia lanparty, Nvision. I used to tourney UT and Quake 2 and 3 back in the day, but I’m so rusty competing in anything now that I’m pretty sure I’m just going to get beat down. We’ll see.
I’m so hooked on Soul Calibur 4 right now. I almost missed a meeting this morning because I was up super late playing it. For the curious, I use Taki, Ivy, and Tira a ton. Yoda’s pretty awesome, but I haven’t gotten the hang of him or the Apprentice just yet.

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